CoCo Refactoring Agency
What does a refactoring agency do?
Strange tools for interesting times.
We build tools and experiences that make relationships sense-able, then help people move through them with care.
What does a refactoring agency do?
Strange tools for interesting times.
We build tools and experiences that make relationships sense-able, then help people move through them with care.
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CoCo Refactoring Agency is a situational design studio in Eugene, Oregon.
To refactor is to rebuild how a system works inside without losing what it's for. We do this with places, stories and practices. We combine a phone app, physical materials and the site itself into quests that people play together.
We work in four domains: language and culture learning, site and cultural interpretation, interactive and ambient experience, and civic and organizational ritual.
We build in the open. Our platform, Vii, runs under the Apache 2.0 license, and we design, host and facilitate experiences on it.
Partner with us to gain a more sensitive understanding. Move with us toward coherence through co-creation and care.
Our XR work began with VAuLT (Virtual and Augmented Reality for Language Learning Training), a toolkit for building place-based, mixed-reality experiences. Both CoCo founders were on the team that built it.
VAuLT was built over nearly ten years at the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon. CASLS is a Title VI National Foreign Language Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education. VAuLT grew there from a 2019 scavenger-hunt app into a full toolkit: a mobile app, and an authoring platform where designers compose experiences from tasks such as text prompts, image recognition, speech-to-text, audio, video and 360° media.
VAuLT's record: about 500 accounts, 141 quests built, and more than 2,000 participants across its featured experiences. Escape from Byru'Moxia reached 950 Fulbright grantees at their pre-departure orientations. The Oregon Experience Laboratory, a mixed-reality installation at the University of Oregon's Fuller Initiative Land Lab during the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, won two Oregon design awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Read about it in The Oregonian and on KLCC. See the Land Lab team and the awards.
At CoCo we design and run mixed-reality experiences for learning, interpretation and public gatherings. We write them in our own Experience Composer and deliver them on an open platform.
The University of Oregon released VAuLT under the Apache 2.0 license in September 2026, and we are refactoring it in public. Vii is the platform: the authoring backend and the API that experiences run on. Mii is the mobile app we are building for it, the part participants carry.
We refactor VAuLT with partners. A student team at the British Columbia Institute of Technology is building Vii's gateway to Canvas, so a teacher can launch an experience from a course and see the results in the gradebook (LTI 1.3). We work with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Oregon and other VAuLT users toward shared stewardship of the code.
The platform belongs to the people who build it. The code is on GitHub.
Ryan Chang and Christopher Daradics founded CoCo in June 2026. Both helped build VAuLT at CASLS.
Ryan Chang is CoCo's chief technical refactorer.
Ryan led the technology team at CASLS from 2019, building its projects end to end as a full-stack engineer with a specialty in databases. That work includes VAuLT's iOS app and its authoring platform, the code base Vii refactors. He built the technology for the Oregon Experience Laboratory, which won two Oregon design awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects. He studied Computer Science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. At CoCo he builds the Vii platform, its mobile app and its integrations, and leads the technical side of the BCIT partnership.
Christopher Daradics is a learning designer and linguist.
Christopher designed language-learning experiences and technology at CASLS for ten years. He has led projects with the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, Carnegie Mellon University, Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Travel Oregon, the City of Eugene and the University of Oregon College of Design. He was institutional host of the 2026 Fulbright Europe/Eurasia Pre-Departure Orientation.
With Sébastien Dubreil of Carnegie Mellon University he wrote Thinking in Motion: Place, Play and Pedagogies of Mutual Relation, forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Place-Based Pedagogies in Language and Culture Education. He co-wrote Crafting Mixed-Reality Experiences, a chapter in Research Horizons on Play in the Teaching of Languages and Cultures (Peter Lang, 2022), and his 2025 ESET paper on cultural flashpoints won Best in Session.
He holds an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Oregon and an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College. Since 2007 he has run The Resonance Building in Eugene as its founder and curator.
For partnerships, pilots and collaborations, write to [email protected].
CoCo Refactoring Agency LLC is an Oregon limited liability company, registered in September 2026 (Oregon Secretary of State registry no. 262256994). 840 Lawrence St, Eugene, Oregon 97401.
Our open code lives at github.com/coco-refactors. Vii and its Canvas gateway are public under Apache 2.0.