Office Spaces: Celia Pearce

Celia is part of a Northeastern team that developed eBee, an electronics quilting game that won the Most Innovative Tabletop Game award at the 2016 Boston Festival of Indie Games. The goal of the game is to build a circuit from a central hub, through an island, and back to the hub. Players who complete a circuit will activate the illumination of an LED light. Celia said EBee, designed with former faculty member Gillian Smith, former graduate student Jeanie Choi, and undergraduate student Isaballa Carlsson, was borne out of her interests in combining quilting, electronics, and game design.

Celia teaches an “Experimental Game Design” course in which she asks her students to stage a “happening”—a form of spontaneous, non-linear action that revolutionized the practice of performance art. Celia said these exercises expose her students to avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. She gives her students items and artifacts—including this umbrella, disco ball, and grabber—to help them create these “happenings.”

Celia, who has taught courses at Wuhan University of Technology in China, has collected a number of Chinese artifacts and decorations. Some of her students are from China, and this purple fan was a gift from one such student.

Celia got this Rosie the Riveter action figure as a gift. She leaves it in the box. “Armed with a rolled-up sleeve and the slogan ‘We can do it!,” she’s an icon of feminism and female empowerment,” she said.

This stuffed animal, a red and white fish, is from Celia’s time at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she taught prior to Northeastern. The fish is a callback to “Mermaids,” an underwater fantasy game that her research group developed there.