Paula Te is a multimedia designer & researcher working at the intersection of collaboration, culture, sustainability, diy, craft, learning, & community. (She picks three of these topics at a time for her other bios.)
She specializes in hybrid digital-physical artifacts and environments that explore alternative visions of the future. Her practice centers community and people from diverse backgrounds, welcoming folks to co-create and contribute their vision of the future, allowing for multiplicities of experiences to unfold.
Paula co-built a platform named Collaboratura as an Instigator Fellow for the San Francisco Opera (2022-2023) to explore tools for creative collaboration across disciplines in the creative arts. She was previously a design researcher at Dynamicland (2015-2019), investigating a new computational medium woven into physical space. Her work on digital fabrication and interfaces has been featured in Ars Electronica, SIGCHI Interaction Design & Children and Eyeo Festival.
A believer of bridging cross-cultural connection through sustainable community craft, she helps organize the Digital Naturalisms Conference and is currently helping with the Gathering for Open Science Hardware 2026. She has been exploring narratives on the Chinese-Indonesian diaspora in collaborations on projects like Born A Problem and 50years.today.
Paula currently resides in Duwamish, Seattle, Washington state. In her day job she works at a cooperatively owned tech worker coop and teaches classes about design with electronics & digital fabrication. She likes owls. 𓅓
See a CV.
Open to collaborations, conversations, and more: paulate@duck.com