Creative Technologist — strawberrycongee
Prototypes as playable questions, bending sensors, synths, LLMs and 3D printing towards play.
Jade (strawberrycongee) is a London based experimental game maker and creative technologist who works at the intersection of engineering, design and research with a focus on play and curiosity. From LEGO SMART Bricks and ML models to game engines and cultural archives, I turn seeds of ideas into tangible, playful things through tech.
At the Creative Play Lab she build prototypes as playable questions across code, synthesizers, electronics, 3D printing and material explorations, created dozens of play prototypes for kids age 6-12. Alongside this, her creative tech practice engineers vibes and statements through arthouse games (PC, web, VR/AR), interactive installations (Arduino, Raspberry pi), and creative applications of ML/AI, with institutions including the V&A, Tate and Anthropic.
Her game practice asks what video games could be. Using worldbuilding and interactive systems of play, she reconstructs the structures that shape our society and everyday life in order to interrogate the larger systems that construct our realities. Through an atmospheric art style, her work explores the affective dimensions of weirdness, alienation and oddity, seeking to invoke reflective, attentive and introspective experiences for its audiences.
Her games and artworks have been shown in 4 countries, monimated by A MAZE. / Berlin, the Leftfield Collection (EGX) and FIVARS.
Find the edges of a system, push past them, and bring something back that changes how people think about what's possible.
Capabilities
- Creative Technology + Play — R&D and playable prototypes at LEGO's Creative Play Lab — code, synths, electronics, 3D printing
- Game Design + Development — design and develop narrative and systems for PC, web, and VR/AR games
- Machine Learning & AI — LLM workflows, Stable Diffusion / IP-Adapter, self-trained next-frame-prediction (pix2pixHD), ComfyUI
- Physical Computing — alt-controllers, sensors, microcontrollers, alt-controllers, and hardware hacks (incl. a 1990s knitting machine)
- 3D & Real-time — Modeling and Animation, Blender & Maya, Substance Painter, procedural animation
Creative Technologist work
2026 · Work Experience · creative technology + play design internship
Exploring how creative tech innovates new forms of digital-physical play with the LEGO SMART Brick.
Ideate and transform early concepts into play-testable prototypes in an R&D environment, using hands-on, iterative design process.
Outputs are under NDA.
Areas Explored: connected physical-digital play design+prototype, interactive soundscape, procedural audio, parts design, material explorations, AI for play, design for kids, gesture recognition & data processing, inclusive design.
About
Treating prototypes as playable questions and exploring how creative tech innovates new forms of digital-physical play with the LEGO SMART Brick. Outputs are under NDA.
- Physical-Digital Rapid Prototyping — Pushing platforms past their intended limits: speculative R&D Translated open-ended briefs into dozens of functional prototypes across 3 missions for the SMART Brick ecosystem (Unity, Python, Mixed Reality, custom electronics). Quick interactions to understand feasibility in the early product stage.
- Play Design & Ideation — Worked closely on unmet play needs (music/performance play, slow/soothing play) in the current portfolio, designed SMART Play features across established and unreleased LEGO IPs.
- Unconventional audio & AI — Custom gestural detection algorithms mapped to real-time sound output, in-house synths hacked for creature speech synthesis, and multi-modal AI workflows that turn children’s humming into music.
- Parts Design & Physical Fabrication — Designing and 3D-modeling custom structural components that conceal the SMART Brick inside a model, solving mainstream ergonomic and aesthetic challenges. Explored various 3D-printing techniques, from 3D-printed origami to biomimetic micro-robotics, and kinetic prosthetics.
- User Testing & Human-centric Design — Ran 10+ playtesting and co-creation sessions with children aged 6–12, translating observational data into rapid design iterations.
- Time — Sept 2025 - June 2026
- Capabilities — Creative ideation, experience design, rapid prototyping for Physical-digital play, User testing
- Tools — Unity(C#), python, javascript, mqtt, osc, websockets, electronics (raspberry pi), 3d printing, fusion 360
2026 · Installation · interactive installation, machine learning
A commissioned physical photobooth that uses Stable Diffusion + IP-Adapter to transform live portraits into vintage 1940s family photographs, printed instantly as thermal receipts. It runs entirely offline on an Macbook: webcam capture, AI style transfer, and receipt composition in a single Python pipeline triggered by a foot switch.
Using a physical printout to ground ephemeral AI generation in a tangible, yet fleeting, artifact that equally renders every user a ghost from a foreign past. The piece explores the artificiality of nostalgia and the fragility of memory, playfully questioning how emerging technology constructs, alters, and ultimately erases our personal histories.
Digital Tundra @ the Henan Provincial Cultural Centre
The piece is shown
- Role — Concept & interaction design, ML pipeline, installation consulting
- Tools — python, Stable Diffusion, ip-adapter, OpenCV, pillow, esc/pos
- Shown at — Digital Tundra @ the Henan Provincial Cultural Centre
Untitled Egg Game
2025 · Alt-controller, Game · alt-controller + game
A funny alternative-controller game about cooking an egg on a slippery surface, built with a custom physical controller.
I designed this pan-shaped controller using Arduino Nano and motion sensor, developed alongside the Untitled Egg Game that features intentionally difficult controls and humorous physics, where the pan and egg are assigned a highly slippery physics material.
Players must tilt the physical pan to apply force to the in-game pan. Frying only counts if the egg is sliding fast enough on the pan, you win the game if the egg is fully cooked.
about
A funny alternative-controller game about cooking an egg on a slippery surface, built with a custom physical controller (Unity + Arduino).
- Role — solo - design, development, hardware
- Tools — Unity, Arduino
2025 · Machinima, Residency, AI/ML · video installation
An AI-powered automated theatre where the Tate's collection endlessly performs itself. Driven by an LLM (Claude API) within a synthetic Unity theatre set, the character's scripts are dynamically drawn from Tate artworks that interrogate performed identity and selfhood.
Exhibited in April 2025 at Tate Modern, developed during the Tate × Anthropic Tea+ Tech & Exchange Residency, a collaborative residency where artists and researchers worked alongside coders and curators, with a focus on AI, art and storytelling. .
About
What happens if an AI is trapped in a loop of introspective monologue? This video installation turns the Tate's collection into an automated theatre endlessly performing itself. Driven by an LLM (Claude API) within a synthetic Unity theatre set, the character's scripts are dynamically drawn from Tate artworks that interrogate performed identity and selfhood.
Ming Wong's Life of Imitation (2009) sits at the centre: a work about performed identity that mirrors the uncanny position of an AI performing orchestrated selves.
Exhibited April 2025 at Tate Modern, developed during the Tate × Anthropic Tea+ Tech & Exchange Residency.
Tate Modern Showcase
Exhibited April 2025 at Tate Modern, developed during the Tate × Anthropic Tea+ Tech & Exchange Residency.
- Role — solo, research, design, development
- Tools — Unity, Claude API
- Shown at — Tate Modern
Memories of Memories
2025 · Experimental, AI/ML
Moving Images generated with next-frame-prediction models that I fine-tuned.
Thin_Air Residency
2023 · Installation, Residency · residency / AV installations
Developed filters and mini-games for camera-based interactive audio-visual installations as an artist in residence at the Beams, London, in collaboration with UCLA Conditional Studio and fellow Goldsmiths artists.
about
As an artist in residence at the Beams, London, in collaboration with UCLA Conditional Studio and fellow Goldsmiths artists, I developed filters and mini-games for camera-based interactive audio-visual installations (OpenGL, Processing).
- Role — Thin_Air artist in residence @ the Beams, London
- Tools — OpenGL, processing
- Shown at — the Beams, London, March - June 2023
[WIP] Interspecies Play
2026 · Game · passion project (in progress)
A current passion project exploring play across species / game design for cat + human
about
A current passion project exploring play across species.
Recognition
- Festival Nomination — Manifest Your Dream Job Sleep Meditation — Most Amazing Award @ A MAZE. Berlin — 2026
- Shortlist — Manifest Your Dream Job Sleep Meditation — Leftfield Collection (EGX) @ Comic Con London — 2026
- Talk — Counterfeit Games: Anti-game Approaches to Playable Experiences — A MAZE. Berlin — 2026
- Residency — PORTAL Residency — V&A — 2026
- Residency — Tea+ Tech & Exchange Residency — Tate × Anthropic — 2025
- Festival Shortlist — in this world nothing is coming back (VR) — FIVARS, Canada — 2024
- Residency — Thin_Air — the Beams, London — 2023