Skip to main content
Global Innovation Design (MA/MSc)

JJ Agcaoili

Box Body: A giant human inside a box on a large LED screen on a tall building in Singapore.

JJ Agcaoili is an interdisciplinary experience designer and artist working in interactive media, digital products, and visual design. He has exhibited work in Singapore and Manila, designed for areas spanning healthcare and tech, and worked in webs 2 and 3. He has a sensitivity for awe and delight that emerges through his work.

Education

  • 2021: BFA Information Design | Ateneo de Manila University
  • 2022: exchange semester | Tsinghua University (virtual)
  • 2022: exchange semester | Nanyang Technological University
  • 2023: MA Global Innovation Design | Royal College of Art
  • 2023: MSc Global Innovation Design | Imperial College London

Awards & Exhibitions

  • Media Architecture Biennale (Finalist, 2023)
  • Ars Electronica — Box Body (2023)
  • Singapore Art Week — Box Body (2023)
  • Great Exhibition Road Festival — Line Lab (2023)
  • Loyola Schools Award for the Arts in Graphic Design (Winner, 2021)
  • International Red Cross Data Visualization Competition (Winner, 2021)

Degree Details

School of DesignGlobal Innovation Design (MA/MSc)RCA2023 at Truman Brewery

Truman Brewery, F Block, First floor

Portrait of JJ

Hi! I'm JJ. I'm an experience artist and interaction designer driven by a relentless curiosity for awe, delight, and human experience. My practice is hallmarked by an intense fascination with people, experience, and technology, with a little drizzle of the sublime. I spent the last two years designing experiences at different scales, across different media, with some of my favorite people on this planet.

My latest projects and collaborations have let me marry my digital background with my budding fascination with physical interaction. Box Body and Line Lab both explore new ways of experiencing reality through a mix of everyday technology and emerging techniques.

With new modes of experience emerging every day, it's an exciting time to create. However, I believe responsible, thoughtful, and delightfully human design is ever important with our increasingly malleable reality.

An augmented reality robot on top of paper cardboard cubes, next to the words "Line Lab"
Digital robot components visualized through AR on top of cardboard cubes
Line Lab brings cardboard and ink to life through AR
Line Lab initial prototype showcased at D-Lab, community maker space based in London.
5 paper/card cubes that showcases a method applicable to most paper-based materials
A method to create cubes out of any paper based material, from printer paper to corrugated cardboard.
Making method demo
5 paper cubes on a pieces of paper, with a list of times written down from iterations
Different iterations of robots and task times recorded from a participant in our workshop
User testing initial concept with children: they get to move the blocks around and JJ recreates the robot on the screen. The goal is to create a robot that stays on the shrinking green island as long as possible.
Custom generated box images for AI training
I trained the Line Lab computer vision model on thousands of generated boxes in various scenarios.

Line Lab lets anyone design animated robots with little more than cardboard, ink, and a mobile device. Our project leverages emerging technologies (including machine learning and augmented reality) through widely available devices to enhance low-resource creative play.

The UK faces an alarming shortfall of STEM skills, costing the nation an estimated 1.5 billion pounds annually. This calls for a strategic and sustainable approach to engineering education from primary school onwards in order to engage with the issue at its root.

A critical component of this educational transformation involves promoting iterative thinking in early education. Yet, actualizing this concept within classrooms poses challenges, particularly in Design & Technology (D&T), the closest subject area to engineering in early education: Time and resources are increasingly constrained. Kits can be prohibitively expensive for underfunded schools, and sustainability is an increasingly critical consideration.

Our solution was co-designed with D&T teachers and further developed through workshops with primary-aged students. By utilizing increasingly available devices like smartphones or tablets, Line Lab lets anyone upcycle scrap cardboard to design and iterate their own virtual toy robots to accomplish different tasks. It blends the tactile joy of physical creation with the magic of digital interaction.

A giant human inside a box on a large LED screen on a tall building in Singapore.
A giant human inside a box on a large LED screen on a tall building in Singapore, alternative viewing angle so it looks skewed
Photo from alternative viewing angle (Photographers: Ahad Mahmood and Arnau Donate)
The set up for filming: camera, lighting, box, etc.
The film set up
A collection of documentation (music by Luling Wang)
Filmed footage remapped to fit the LED screen
A giant human inside a box on a large LED screen on a tall building in Singapore, alternative viewing angle so it looks skewed
Eager onlookers

Box Body is an interactive media art installation showcasing the novel Living Screen filming technique that Xin and I developed and displayed on the streets of Singapore. That's Xin, in that box. We achieved this naked-eye 3D effect without the use of any computer-generated imagery, totally flattening anamorphic video production time and achieving a marvelous picture that could even be streamed and interacted with, live. 

This was showcased in Singapore as a part of the 2023 Act-Art festival organized by Aura Murillo. Special shoutout to Ahad, our director of photography who took the project above and beyond in inception, our next photographer Erving, who kept the project alive, Ina, whose enthusiasm fueled us, Gary, who owns the building, and all our friends who made this happen.

In Collaboration with:

Singapore, 2023. Curated by Aura Murillo and Ina Conradi in collaboration with Ten Square, Landmark of Good and Media Art Nexus.

Medium:

Interactive Media
anamorphicinteractive-medialive-interactionmedia-architecturenew-mediaperformanceprojection-mappingsocial-commentary
Previous StudentNext Student

Social

About

Royal College of Art

Registered Office: Royal College of Art,
Kensington Gore, South Kensington,
London SW7 2EU