NC State College of Design | Spring 2024
DESIGNING FOR THE FUTURE
Cora Jones, a media arts, design and technology (MADTech) student, developed “Unveiled,” a futuristic AR filter that reimagines the concept of the bridal veil. The components were 3D-modeled on Blender and brought to life using Snapchat’s Lens Studio program.
You can experience the filter yourself by opening Snapchat and scanning the QR code (left).
MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN
As the celebrations of our 75th anniversary come to a close and I fondly reflect on the college’s accomplishments, I’m reminded of the opportunity to look ahead and envision what the future of the College of Design might hold.
While it’s impossible to predict the future, there are resonating themes emerging on how we see our institutions, our approach to education and even the makeup of the students attending college changing in the coming years. Here are a few of my insights into what’s ahead:
An increased focus on collaboration. In the past, the College of Design has operated somewhat isolated from the rest of the university. As we explore more problembased learning, we’re not just looking at different disciplines within the collegewe’re expanding that reach university-wide and beyond. The wicked problems of today require a team-based approach, and design is willing to create learning opportunities that support creative solutions.
A shift to interdisciplinary learning. Will we ever lose our independent identities within the disciplines? I don’t think so. But I do see a more fluid movement between disciplines, especially as the available technology continues to advance. The
advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) alone require strong partnerships within other areas of the university to successfully navigate. We cannot have successful interdisciplinary learning without strong disciplinary homes, but I think we will continue to shift toward problem-based learning models.
An emphasis on credentialing to support our licensed professions. Many of our disciplines feed into license-based professions, but as you progress throughout your career, it becomes even more important to have credentials in specific, niche areas. We’ve not been very facile at proving those credentials in the past and we need to explore ways to continue to support our alumni throughout their careers.
A shift in the nature of our students. motivations we see in today’s students are vastly different than what we have seen in years past. They require different support structures, and have been greatly impacted by remote learning. We’re exploring ways to use our classrooms and studios more intentionally and collaboratively to provide those social structures, making the studio a laboratory for the exchange of ideas.
A changing mindset towards higher education. We’re starting to see cultural shifts in the perception of higher education and its value – these shifts could have large
Spring 2024
Designlife Magazine
financial implications in years to come and will impact how these institutions receive and utilize funding. As a college, we’ll continue to emphasize the value of interacting within the community and using real problems as the laboratory for teaching.
While there are significant shifts in the years to come, one thing that won’t change is our commitment to our students. We will always ensure that our graduates will be prepared for their careers and that the skills they learn here will benefit them throughout their life. That is a model that I hope we will carry into the next 75 years.
Mark Elison Hoversten PhD, FASLA, AICP Dean, College of Design NC State University
DESIGNING A
Our last issue of Designlife Magazine focused on the college’s past in celebration of its 75th anniversary. This issue fulfills the second half of our vision for our 75th anniversary: to establish the inspirational grounding for the future in design education.
BUILDING EQUITY INTO COMMUNITIES
Within these pages, we explored the future of design in four areas – education, community, climate and technology – tapping into the thought leadership of current and former faculty who are shepherding the next generation of designers to prepare for an ever-evolving future.
DEAN
Mark Elison Hoversten, PhD, FASLA, AICP
EDITOR
Christine Klocke
DESIGNER
Ellie Bruno
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Max Cohen
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Miriam Antelis
Meredith Davis
Sam Gunnells
DIRECT COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS TO:
Christine Klocke
Director of Communications and Marketing
NC State College of Design Campus Box 7701
Raleigh, NC 27695-7701
DESIGNING A RESILIENT TOMORROW
Preparing our planet to weather the trials of a changing climate will take problemsolvers offering ideas from the bottom up and the top down. Powered by design thinking, researchers in the College of Design are well-equipped to foster this essential collaboration. Visualization created by the
SAM GUNNELLS
Preparing our planet to weather the trials of a changing climate will take problemsolvers offering ideas from the bottom up and the top down. Powered by design thinking, researchers in the College of Design are well-equipped to foster this essential collaboration.
Andrew Fox, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, has made a career designing solutions for people living in collision with the Earth’s most abundant resource: water.
As a licensed landscape architect, Fox earned his expertise through years of work on community-scale design projects throughout the Pacific Northwest. In crafting designs for public schools and urban parks, he saw firsthand how a warming climate altered the region’s rivers and coastal systems — melting snowpack, lifting sea levels, worsening floods and demanding that impacted communities adapt their development patterns.
“Inherently, when you deal with environmental planning and landscape architecture, you’re always thinking about natural systems, water systems, social systems, and understanding where the complications lie between them,” says Fox. “I learned that, in an era of climate change, those complications increasingly lie in how we design our systems to be more resilient.”
The Future Requires Resilience
Fox’s quest to come to grips with the problems of resilience ultimately led him to the College of Design. Here, in 2013, he co-founded the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab (CDDL) to help communities in the Atlantic Coastal Plain solve their unique environmental design challenges.
North Carolina’s share of the Coastal Plain includes many of the fastest growing counties in the state, like Brunswick, Currituck and Pender counties. Unfortunately, as Fox attests, the mostly rural communities dotting this region often lack the resources and expertise to sustain — on their own — the robust dialogue needed to make informed choices about long-term growth in this dynamic landscape.
“As we got started with our work, we quickly realized that the concept of multidisciplinarity was largely missing from conversations around climate adaptation and resilience in these communities,” says Fox.
Like Fox, Gavin Smith has spent his professional life answering questions of land use and development in the face of a warming climate. For Smith, that work has often happened at the highest tiers of public leadership.
An internationally acclaimed expert on natural hazards and climate adaptation, he’s advised four U.S. governors, multiple state agencies, more than 100 local governments and several nations to shape long-term disaster recovery, natural hazards risk reduction and climate adaptation policies. Smith, like his colleague Fox, has come to view cross-disciplinary dialogue as critical for designing more resilient communities.
“Historically, land use planners, engineers and policymakers have thought about issues of climate adaptation and community planning with their own specialized blinders on,” says Smith. “I think it’s vital that we broaden the conversation.”
Smith heads up a graduate program in disaster resilient policy, engineering and design, which features three tracks offering varied coursework to grow leaders who are
comfortable bringing divergent modes of thinking to the shared conversation around climate adaptation. He also leads an applied research project, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, aimed at developing national teams of broadly skilled experts — including university faculty and extension agents from every state and territory — geared, like the CDDL, to help vulnerable communities plan for long-term climatic preparedness.
“A large focus of my work is to foster more interdisciplinary thinking around what I would argue is the grand challenge of the 21st century,” says Smith, “which is, how are we going to adapt to a changing climate by retrofitting existing cities and towns, resettling at-risk populations and thinking carefully about where and how we build in the future.”
Solutions From the Bottom Up
The good news, in the minds of College of Design solution-finders like Smith and Fox, is that a crucial factor for meaningful action might just lie in society’s willingness to embrace design thinking within the wider dialogue around climate adaptation.
“I’m increasingly excited by the idea of bringing in designers, like architects and landscape architects, to help depict different land use scenarios and how the factors involved might change with our changing climate,” says Smith.
“Design is inherently optimistic,” says Fox. “That’s what’s exciting for us in the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab — the idea that we can start from catastrophe and then, by articulating to decision-makers what’s happening and the solutions needed, begin to work optimistically toward future opportunities for change.”
Fox insists that conversations around climate resilience must begin at the level of community engagement. That’s because, he says, at the heart of these conversations sit people equipped with first-hand knowledge of the everyday vulnerabilities they face.
Through a process of sustained community immersion that Fox refers to as “longitudinal engagement,” he and his lab colleagues — who wield a diversity of academic and professional experience — develop a foundation of deep trust with local knowledgeholders as they learn the needs of their partner communities. In doing so, they plant the seeds for an enduring collaboration that bolsters a community’s ability to adapt in the face of future change.
“As the planet gets warmer and wetter, these communities will face worsening risks — that’s just a fact,” says Fox.
Fox describes the step-by-step action plans, or floodprints, that he and his colleagues create with their local partners as “blueprints for flood mitigation and long-term resilience at a community scale, broken up into discrete project opportunities.” Beyond merely identifying these potential projects, the lab provides assistance to help communities apply for and manage the funding that makes them happen.
In 2019, the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab invested its expertise in the town of Pollocksville — a rural community located along the Trent River, in eastern North Carolina — after Hurricane Florence caused flooding that destroyed dozens of homes and businesses, shut off power for 11 days and forced more than 150 of the town’s nearly 300 residents to flee for refuge. Over the course of a year, the researchers worked with residents and town leaders to understand their challenges and aspirations, then laid out a floodprint packed with strategic solutions to help them begin the work of rebuilding a more resilient Pollocksville.
“We helped them, for instance, write a grant that allowed them to construct wetlands along the riverfront,” says Fox. “That accomplished flood mitigation, increased biodiversity, beautified the community and expanded elements for recreation. It’s one example of how a suite of solutions can work together for a community.”
Today, Pollocksville has rebounded to nearly 280 residents — and its partnership with the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab is empowering them to plan for new growth.
Leadership From the Top Down
Although Smith echoes Fox’s insistence on the importance of community-level dialogue,
“As the planet gets warmer and wetter, these communities will face worsening risks — that’s just a fact.”
ANDREW FOX
Opposite: A map of the City of Lumberton which overlays various areas of vulnerability, such as adjacency to flooding with population data, including people of color, those over 65, and renters. Courtesy of the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab.
Above: Individuals in Australia consider a map of vulnerable areas.
he stresses that policymakers and public officials must embrace their own leadership roles to help communities navigate the currents of our changing climate.
Smith points to his professional efforts in the late ’90s as an assistant director with the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management when, in the wake of destructive hurricanes Fran and Floyd, he worked alongside Gov. Jim Hunt and other public leaders to develop state policies intended to address gaps in federal aid. Those policies, secured with strong action from Hunt, required at-risk communities to create local hazard mitigation plans while calling for more than 5,000 flood-prone homes to be relocated to less vulnerable areas. This state-level leadership went on to guide the federal Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which provided a framework for communities
nationwide to implement hazard mitigation plans with the aid of federal resources.
Forward-thinking leaders, Smith asserts, can also spur action by urging local governments to adopt regulations that better align with our evolving understanding of climate change — such as stronger design standards to ensure that structures built on the coast can withstand the higher wind and water loads more extreme hurricane seasons will bring.
“If you go to a beach community in North Carolina, you’ll see homes elevated on pile foundations,” says Smith. “Most of those homes are elevated to what is mapped as the 100-year flood. But in an era of climate change, those standards for what was once considered a 100-year flood are likely to be insufficient.”
In 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — which flooded more than 50,000 families out of their homes in Mississippi — Smith helped advise the state’s governor, Haley Barbour, to spearhead action that strengthened standards for building transitional housing to temporarily shelter those displaced residents. These efforts led to the development of safer, more energyefficient modular homes, which were deployed in large numbers across the state; and it was Barbour’s testimony to Congress, Smith says, that secured the $400 million grant to have them built.
“Here’s the bottom line,” says Smith. “If our leaders don’t start getting more serious about building to better standards and in less vulnerable areas, and about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the possible scenarios include conflict and economic
collapse at a level that’s hard to imagine.”
Our College Shapes the Conversation
Whatever challenges the future brings, Fox and Smith are united in their belief that the College of Design is well-equipped to nurture the full dialogue around climate adaptation — from the highest rungs of the policymaking ladder to the smallest neighborhood.
In their teaching and in their research, Smith and Fox depend on narrative devices, like interactive maps and 3D simulations, powered by the principles of design. By helping people to visualize their vulnerabilities, these tools, they believe, can stir a deeper awareness — in our leaders and in our communities — about the climatic risks we all face, and help steer people at
all levels of the conversation toward more meaningful action.
“One question I’m working on with my students and with other researchers is, how do we visually depict different policy options and impact scenarios,” says Smith. “That might involve showing residents or developers or policymakers a changing map of sea-level rise, or of storm surges or wind loads based on different rates of warming or different hurricane strengths.”
“These problems are complex, and they need to be both managed and articulated well if we hope to solve them,” says Fox. “That requires different disciplines involved and will also mean educating future decisionmakers to recognize that they may not have expertise in, say, lateral loads on a structure in a storm, but someone else they can talk to, like an engineer, will.”
STUDENT PREDICTIONS
What future challenges do you think will affect your generation of designers?
STORY CONTRIBUTORS
It’s this approach to climate adaptation — an approach fueled by interdisciplinary dialogue and design thinking — that’s positioning the College of Design as a crucial collaborator in the drive toward a resilient global society that can solve the challenges of a changing planet Earth.
“I get emails from students who’ve graduated from our program,” says Smith. “They’ll tell me, ‘I’ve got a job in a design firm, and my firm is actively going after new graduates because they’re perfectly equipped to tackle these issues of resilience.’ The students are reporting back that the classroom experience — the interdisciplinary thinking and the team-oriented approach — it’s all helping them to solve these problems out there in the world.”
ALISON
“I think the biggest challenge for our generation of designers going forward is thinking about sustainability and accessibility across time, not only with climate change in designing for a more simple world, but also thinking about how to keep things accessible and sustainable in terms of being able to be seen and used as technology changes.”
Andy Fox, FASLA, PLA Andrew Fox is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at NC State and the co-founding director of the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab (CDDL), a community technical assistance initiative that transforms research, engagement, teaching and design into action and tangible change for community partners. Under his direction, CDDL project outcomes have resulted in an additional $13M+ in direct-to-community grants for project partners.
Gavin Smith, PhD, AICP Gavin Smith is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at NC State, where he teaches courses focused on natural hazards, disasters and climate change adaptation. Smith’s career has emphasized blending practice, applied research, community engagement and education.
Author: Sam Gunnells Sam Gunnells is a writer, researcher and collaborative communicator at NC State with wide interests in history, science, literature and the humanities. He enjoys telling stories that connect the dynamic research and diverse scholarship happening at NC State with the university’s storied past.
COLLEGE OF DESIGN UPDATES
COLLEGE RECEIVES $10M TRANSFORMATIVE GIFT
The Initiative for Community Growth and Development will be renamed The Pappas Real Estate Development Program, thanks to a $10 million gift from Peter Pappas. The program champions community building through place-making by fostering student and professional growth in interdisciplinary real estate development education and research. The program educates and graduates the next generation of professionals who will be properly equipped with a comprehensive skill set to plan, design and build the North Carolina of the future. Founded in the College of Design with Director Chuck Flink and Dean Mark Hoversten, this transformative gift marks the largest gift in the history of the college. Under Flink’s stewardship, the program will be housed under the Provost’s Office of Instructional Programs. Students can take interdisciplinary coursework in urban planning and real estate development, while researchers will apply design thinking to land use and community development challenges.
FACULTY AWARDS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Thomas Barrie won the NC State Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence.
Jianxin Hu [Architecture] won the NC State Alumni Association Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award.
Matt Peterson [Graphic & Experience Design] was selected as a 2023-2024 University Faculty Scholar.
Marc Russo [MADTech] won the NC State Outstanding Teacher Award.
LEADERS COUNCIL UPDATES
Jennifer Heintz will serve as the next Leaders Council president, effective July 1 while Kenneth Luker will assume the role of past president.
Several members will complete their terms, including:
Turan Duda Founding Principal Duda|Paine Architects
Chuck Flink President Greenways, Inc.
Laura Levinson Chief Creative Officer Valdese Weavers
Matt McConnell Owner McConnell Studios
Angela Medlin Design Director of Apparel HOKA
George Stanziale President Stanziale Development Strategies, PC
Frank Werner Chief Creative Officer Valdese Weavers
Four new members will join in July:
Morgan Besterman
Designer, adidas Kids, Volume Channel, Costco, LT Apparel Group
Mike Joose Director, Brand ID & Design Studio, VML
Greg Lindquist Artist and Writer
Tim Shih Design Advisor, Yanfeng
DESIGNING IN AN ENVIRONMENT OF CHANGE
An internal view from Scale Worlds, a virtual reality (VR) environment that enables students to explore dramatic differences in scale through powers of 10. Scale Worlds is funded by a $1.35 million NSF grant with Matthew Peterson (Design), Cesar Delgado (Education), and Karen Chen (Engineering, lead) as principal investigators.
MEREDITH DAVIS
A 75th anniversary is a good time to reflect on “how we got here;” on how design and education responded to the evolving context for practice in the past.
A 75th anniversary is a good time to reflect on “how we got here;” on how design and education responded to the evolving context for practice in the past.
More importantly, however, a milestone year also prompts reflection on “where we might go;” on the futures-oriented work of design practitioners and the preparation of students for an environment of increasing uncertainty.
Modern design curricula entered American universities in the first half of the 20th century as higher education turned from classical studies to concern for the practical consequences of industrialization, urbanization, and social change. A 1950 Buckminster Fuller assignment at NC State University, for example, asked students to design for the automation of a North Carolina cotton mill. And while Europe rebuilt from war, American industry scaled production and advertising to satisfy a growing public appetite for modern style.
After watching high-profile educational experiments under émigré Bauhaus designers— at Black Mountain College, Harvard University, Yale University, and Illinois Institute of Technology—many public universities adopted the easilyreplicated German curriculum. Emphasizing appearance and craft—consistent with the typical program location and faculty
expertise in art departments— the Bauhaus-inspired design curricula organized study around perceptual principles and the mastery of modern materials. By the 1960s it was the dominant curricular model for American design education, and in many places, persists today.
UC Berkeley professors
Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber presented a challenge to the modern notion of design and planning as addressing simple problems of universal form and function. In a 1973 publication of Policy Sciences, they introduced the concept of “wicked
problems,” describing design as a paradox—on one hand, grounded by infinite makeability and the unlimited potential of the future, and on the other hand by emotional engagement aimed at overcoming an unequal distribution of social capital.1 They refuted an industrial view of design as action taken at a few leverage points in simple causal chains, instead arguing for multiple and often conflicting views of situations embedded in complex causal networks of interacting systems.
In this sense, a system is more than a collection of
messages, objects, or spaces that share a family resemblance or function, and complexity is more than the number of things to design or functions to address. Systems involve relationships among actors, elements, and forces that transform inputs into outputs over time. These interdependencies are variable, dynamic, and emergent, not fixed. Design effects cascade at different rates through the nested layers by which healthy societies and environments absorb the stress of change— through the slower-moving territory of infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature,
College of Design students in Buckminster Fuller’s class design an automated cotton mill using a geodesic dome structure. From the NC State University Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Digital Materials.
“As the enduring content of design, education must amplify students’ critical consideration of the values furthered by the application of constantly changing technical skills.”
MEREDITH DAVIS
as well as the fast-paced consumer-facing economic layers that were the locus of 20th century design.2
This shift from simple causal chains to complex dynamic networks means that students must learn to frame problems, not simply solve them. Rittel described the true nature of wicked problems as revealed gradually, concurrently, and collaboratively through an argumentative process and participatory methods. His account suggests that propositional modeling of the breadth and depth of situations (not just possible solutions) is a fundamental design skill that mediates constituents’ inevitably conflicting worldviews. As such, it implies that design students may learn more by comparing different plausible problem frames than by comparing different solutions to the same faculty-authored project.
While the human-centered design movement of the 1990s added value to individual experiences and organizational competitiveness, today’s design challenges are situated within an environment of continual change that undermines purely reactive approaches to known needs. UNESCO’s Riel Miller describes this as a “change in the nature of change itself.”3 Design work is no longer only about the “what” (messages, objects, and spaces that respond to current conditions), but about an ongoing
“why” (facilitating, improving, sharing control, sustaining, and making things more equitable and just). This futures-oriented agenda focuses on probable consequences under the velocity and volatility of ongoing change.
In moving the emphasis of design from nouns to verbs— from things to intent—design professionals and design education need theories of change that both project future conditions and generate new knowledge about how change happens. For example, we must not only understand resource depletion that results from 100 million Americans tossing their cellphones into landfills each year, but also how to transition producers’ business metrics to the triple bottom line of a circular economy and to design products for right-to-repair systems that change consumers’ attitudes toward disposal.
Technology is responsible for many of the most obvious changes in the context for design practice. It destabilizes older curricula built to explore the tangible characteristics of materials under a designer’s intuition about what people need and want. Unlike earlier times, information today is abundant; important design tasks are to ask good questions, discover patterns, and structure all that data in ways that offer insights not possible through human processing alone. As the new media of design (not just tools
of production), data and computational technology can project emerging conditions, anticipate breakdowns, and rate confidence in design performance. They make possible consideration of multiple futures and variable interactions among social, technical, and natural systems. The data collection and feedback loops in products and environments to inform and update next-generation design responses; a new goal of “good enough for now” replaces the fixed limits of “almost perfect.” And technology offers platforms,
with designed rules and values for their behavior. These systems transfer control and allow others to create value and customize responses to changing circumstances. In the best cases, the design of the technology itself embodies physicist Heinz von Foerster’s advice “to always act to increase the number of choices;” to design for resilience in an yetunknown future.
All of this change raises the ethical stakes for today’s designers. Bias is baked
into what we now see as the scope of a design problem, the designed systems we build and use, and the metrics by which we measure success. In many instances, technology hides bias under the guise of machine neutrality. Peter Dormer described craftmanship in the age of technology, not as the mark of individual handicraft, but as virtuosity in overcoming the intrinsic constraints of tools built by collective intelligence.4 As the enduring content of design, education must amplify students’
Former master of graphic & experience design student Liz Chen demonstrates a virtual typographic interface from her project, which focused on expanding a literature search into a physical space.
critical consideration of the values furthered by the application of constantly changing technical skills.
As we enter what historians call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”—one in which physical and virtual systems cooperate for new ways in which we live, relate to each other, and seek equilibrium with our environment—it seems like a good time
for design programs to ask what it means to design for change, to anticipate not just react. And even more than in the twentieth century, design has an opportunity to shape a future that is not only plausible but meaningful. The College of Design has the raw material for just such curricula, so the next 75 years will tell if we live up to our history.
STUDENT PREDICTIONS
What
future challenges do you think will affect your generation of designers?
“I think that the biggest challenge designers will face is the digital technological phase of design. What we’re learning now, program-wise, might not be as applicable five years from now. While it’s great that we’re learning how to use new programs, we have to think about new technologies that haven’t even been thought of or created yet.”
STORY CONTRIBUTOR
Author: Meredith Davis Meredith Davis is a professor emerita of graphic & experience design at NC State University, where she taught for 26 years. During her tenure, she served as department head, director of graduate programs, and director of the PhD in Design program. Davis’ research explores the use of design in achieving the goals of educational reform in K-12 schools and the relationship between design and learning. Davis is a fellow and 2005 national medalist of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). She is the recipient of more than 50 national and international design awards, and is a former president of the American Center for Design and the founding president of the Graphic Design Education Association.
Her authored works include Problem Solving in the Man-made Environment (1974), Design as a Catalyst for Learning (1999), Graphic Design Theory (2012), Typography (editor, 2012), Visual Communication Design (2017), Teaching Design (2017) and over 100 articles and book chapters on design, design education and design research.
FOOTNOTES
1. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences, 4(2), 1973, pp. 155-169 2. Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 3. Riel Miller, Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. 46 4. Peter Dormer, The Culture of Craft, (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997)
COLLEGE OF DESIGN STUDENTS
TOTAL STUDENT ENROLLMENT
IN-STATE: 757 OUT OF STATE: 214
UNDERGRADUATE: 688
GRADUATE: 283
This year, the College of Design experienced record levels of enrollment, admitting 289 new students for the largest student population to date with 971 students. NC State experienced a record-breaking year for admissions, receiving over 39,855 firstyear applications and admitting 39.5% of the applicant pool. Below is a visual representation of our student body.
BUILDING EQUITY INTO COMMUNITIES
MIRIAM ANTELIS
With people and businesses flocking to the Research Triangle, the economy and population — and housing costs — of Wake County are on the rise.
Tania Allen and Sara Queen are digging deeper into the issue of racial inequity in the physical structures of our cities and communities. Through mapping and visualization, they aim to uncover how social, economic and political systems manifest into the built environment.
MLA student Britt Davis visualizes the effects of toxins in the built environment that play a role in the pervasiveness of Alzheimer’s Dementia as part of Allen and Queen’s DIY Cartography course.
With people and businesses flocking to the Research Triangle, the economy and population — and housing costs — of Wake County are on the rise.
Wake County’s 2023 Annual Housing Report revealed that 56,000 working families with incomes below $39,000 a year are unable to find affordable housing.
In the next 20 years, that number is expected to rise to as many as 150,000. The report stated that “more than 100 years of history of policies, programs and practices created our current racial and economic divide,” with Black, Indigenous and Latino/ Hispanic households being disproportionately impacted by the increasing cost of housing.
But the housing crisis isn’t just affecting the poorest and most marginalized communities — it’s becoming a central problem for people at multiple income scales, said Tania Allen, associate professor of media arts, design and technology.
Allen and Sara Queen, associate professor of architecture, are digging deeper into the issue of racial inequity in the physical structures of our cities and communities. Through mapping and visualization, they aim to uncover how social, economic and political systems manifest into the built environment.
Moving Forward by Looking Back
To figure out how we got here — and where to go next — Allen and Queen are taking a closer look at the past. “When we intervene in a built environment, we want to do so with more intentionality, in a way that is more inclusive and better serves the communities in it.”
In one project, Allen and Queen examined visible and invisible systems of repression, oppression and racism in the built environment. They overlaid the erection dates and locations of Confederate monuments with economic, social and educational policy from the past 150 years and found a correlation between many oppressive and racist policies and the construction of Confederate monuments.
“When you overlay the data with these systems, the visual data show us that while these symbols don’t overtly do anything, they reinforce policies and social practices associated with white supremacy,” said Queen.
Allen and Queen have found that dimensions of the local and national housing crisis can also be traced back to these same policies.
“When looking at home ownership, we don’t just say, ‘More white people than Black people own homes today, and that’s too bad.’ We also look at
Durham’s Hayti Community before NC-147 freeway construction and urban renewal, 1959. Photo courtesy of the North Carolina archives and Open Durham.
Durham’s Hayti Community after NC-147 freeway construction and urban renewal, 2008. Photo courtesy of the North Carolina archives and Open Durham.
why, and we realize that this was intentional,” said Allen. “The issue has deep roots in historical policy and segregation, and an intentional deprivation of resources; many years of research and scholarship support this. What the process of visualization does is bring these patterns to the foreground and, we hope, provide another way to access and explain them.”
Allen and Queen have examined several policies and practices in Raleigh over time — and what they reveal about societal values and current issues facing the city.
“Historic patterns of segregation, changing property values, the investment in infrastructures in certain parts of the city — and a very purposeful disinvestment in other parts — expose societal value systems concerning who should and shouldn’t be served,” said Queen. “Sadly, with increases in property values driven by rapid growth, we are witnessing how vulnerable communities, which were systemically disinvested in for decades, are now being displaced through redevelopment.”
Incorporating Lived Experiences
Analyzing data is only part of the work of restructuring spaces to be more inclusive. Designers also have to go into communities to discover, understand and
incorporate residents’ lived experiences. To help with this aspect of research, Allen and Queen collaborate with colleagues inside and outside of the College of Design and NC State.
Most recently, they contributed to a forthcoming book, Empty Pedestals: Countering Confederate Narratives Through Public Design, co-edited by Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming, professors in the college.
“The book is a reflection on what happened in the summer of 2020, when mass action was pulling down Confederate monuments and monuments to colonialism all over the world,” said Boone. “It explores what designers can do to help communities figure out what to do next. [Allen and Queen] contributed some great work based on their oppressive infrastructures research project, and we’re really grateful for that.”
Boone’s work lies in the overlap of landscape architecture and environmental justice, which entails engaging communities and their cultures to assess how to best use design to serve them.
“What [Boone’s] research adds to our work is a direct connection to communities, especially those that have been disenfranchised from many of the economic and social policies that historically impacted generational wealth building,” Allen said.
“History is an essential element to understanding where we are right now, so we look to history to inform a better future.”
SARA QUEEN
Allen, Queen and Boone combine their skills to work toward their goal of creating inclusive communities through physical structures. In 2016, they took part in Homeplace, an initiative led by Coastal Dynamics Design Lab to develop conversation guides for six communities trying to rebuild after Hurricane Matthew. The guides were created to help survivors make sense of the complex technical information associated with recovery efforts.
One of the six communities included in Homeplace was Princeville, North Carolina. Established in 1865 by freed African Americans after the Civil War, the town was built in the floodplain of the Tar River.
“After the end of the Civil War, the only land available to many free African American people was the land that was least desirable to white people,” said Boone. “It’s a phenomenon called racialized topography, where oftentimes you can correlate the elevation of the land with the demographics of the land, particularly with Black communities and towns. In many places across the American South, higher elevations are often occupied by white communities, and lower elevations are occupied by Black and brown communities.”
Allen and Queen are keen on seeing such integrative and co-creative approaches implemented more regularly in
design practices as we look to the future. They believe the key to creating functional, beautiful spaces that honor local citizens is combining the technical expertise of designers with communities’ expertise on their values and culture. “We think it’s critical to see community members as equal partners,” Allen adds.
Preparing the
Next Generation of Designers
One step Allen and Queen are taking to incorporate inclusivity into design practices is to train their students to be communityminded and to think critically about data.
In their cross-disciplinary Do It Yourself (DIY) Cartography seminar, students use mapping techniques to uncover hidden meanings between data and reality. Allen and Queen present their students with a topic to analyze, such as the housing crisis.
Because sets of data — which typically come from a specific moment in time, location or population sample — are inherently isolated from the broader systems they describe, they can be flawed. Allen and Queen work with their students to critically question biases and assumptions within data and its visualization.
After spending the first half of the semester understanding patterns and questioning the visualization tools they’ve used to do so, Allen, Queen and the students begin formulating a research question. At the end of the course, students take their findings out into different communities, comparing what they learned by studying them “from afar” with how that compares with the observations and conversations that might happen “on the ground.”
“What I love about the class is that, at the end, I understand the topic differently than I did at the beginning. I understand it with more complexity, depth and nuance. And sometimes my opinion about it changes,” said Queen. “We don’t come in to teach ‘a truth’ about it. We come in with a question, just the same as the students are going to in practice.”
Urban Community AgriNomics (UCAN) community workshop. Photo courtesy of LSU Press.
Shifting Mindsets
By creating these visualizations, Allen and Queen hope to catalyze informed conversation that leads to a shift in culture and mindset to bring about change in built environments. “When not everyone’s needs are understood as part of the whole, and someone goes with an unserved need, it hurts our collective,” said Queen. “That’s got to shift in our culture, to make places more inclusive.”
Rather than trying to force change, Allen and Queen are focused on equipping designers to better understand the problems in built environments. With this understanding, Allen and Queen believe that designers can better serve communities and find ways to create built environments that reflect public health and community as societal values. The goal is for policy to eventually reflect these values, too.
“I hope that in the next 10 to 20 years, we will find ways to value health and community in ways
that drive decisions,” said Queen. “Economic impact is what often drives decisions right now, and things like health and community aren’t fully calculated within that.”
While it can be difficult to build consensus in society around important issues, Boone sees opportunities to take incremental steps toward achieving equity in built environments.
“We don’t often ask when we work on design projects: What’s the public health situation? Who are the people that are really
dealing with the burdens of these challenges? And I think that, from a system standpoint, we can do that,” said Boone. “The tools are more available than ever. Data is more available than it ever was, to provide evidence to say that there are many different ways we could proceed in terms of how we define an issue and how we solve it.”
The consequences of neglecting such issues when designing built environments are serious. Aside from the housing crisis, climate change
Students in Allen and Queen’s DIY cartography class during a poster critique.
is also impacting communities across the state. Historically in North Carolina, landfills with the carcinogenic chemical compounds polychlorinated biphenyls were disproportionately placed in predominantly low-income, Black communities. Hog lagoons and coal ash ponds remain disproportionately located in such communities.
“There is a huge community that’s at risk if we don’t intervene and come up with better design strategies for how to make the places we live more livable,” said Boone. “The issues we’re facing are that the tools that we have
right now from a design perspective don’t yet meet the scale of challenges we face.”
Ultimately, community-driven change, supported by the technical expertise of design professionals, is the key to developing inclusive built environments. But change won’t happen overnight. Collaboration among designers, communities and policymakers is essential to accomplishing policy changes. Allen and Queen are bringing their findings to policymakers to inform solutions and future decisions. Queen, for instance, has served on the City of Raleigh Planning Commission,
STUDENT PREDICTIONS
What impact do you want to make as a designer?
which advises the City Council on issues of future growth and development affecting the city.
“At the end of the day, we’re not trying to say, ‘This is the singular new policy that should happen.’ That’s not our expertise,” said Queen. “But we want to bring understandable complexity to the conversation in order to have more informed discussions — and to do so in a way that acknowledges many forms of expertise and lived experiences.”
“The
impact I’d like to make as a designer would be to help tell more meaningful stories within the context of people’s
STORY CONTRIBUTORS
lives in the communities that I serve. So as a designer, helping to create a sense of space regardless
projects I’m working on - I’d like to
of what
be working on projects that contribute to public health and public participation in society.”
Tania Allen Tania Allen is an associate professor and the director of graduate programs for media arts, design and technology at NC State. Along with Sara Queen, Allen is the co-director of the design research group co-lab, which focuses on critical mapping as a participatory design research tool. Currently, co-lab’s focus is on developing a methodology for critical mapping that simultaneously embraces cartography as a powerful analytic and synthetic research tool, while also challenging the assumptions that the mapping and visualization process embeds within it.
Kofi Boone, FASLA Kofi Boone, FASLA is the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at NC State University. His work is in the overlap between landscape architecture and environmental justice with specializations in democratic design, digital media and interpreting cultural landscapes.
Sara Queen Sara Queen is an associate professor of architecture and director of the First Year Experience program at NC State. In addition to teaching, Queen’s ongoing research investigates infrastructural networks through mapping methodologies with the goal of facilitating deeper, more diverse understandings of urban systems and the processes which shape physical place, cultural space and social territory.
Author: Miriam Antelis Miriam Antelis is a marketing writer for University Communications and Marketing and the College of Sciences. She enjoys finding creative ways to tell stories about NC State’s people, programs and problem-solving research.
PAYING IT FORWARD: SEEDING SUCCESS IN A NEW GENERATION OF DESIGNERS
Alumnus Jerry Cook [B.Arch. ‘66] was the first in his family to attend college. Jerry worked to put himself through college, alternating between attending the College of Design for one semester and working one semester to support himself. Taking seven years to graduate was well worth the effort, as he became a licensed and practicing architect in more than 35 states during his career.
Both he and his wife Marilyn shared a similar experience of being first-generation college students, and they wanted to provide a means of supporting future students who are navigating similar, unfamiliar paths.
“I went into college with no support at all - just trying to find my own way. I do not want students to have to do that anymore - I want students to have a door that can be knocked on, someone they can turn to for advice on getting loans or scholarships or supplies,” he says.
Working with the development team in the college, the Cooks chose to create the Jerry and Marilyn Cook Design Endowment to support first-generation students through enrichment funds for study abroad opportunities, supplemental aid towards supplies and technology needs, and a coach and career advocate to provide mentorship within the college. Partnering with the NC State Pack Promise program, the endowment
will provide aid to 10-15 design students each year, starting in their sophomore year.
“This will be a transformational gift for our college,” says Dean Mark Elison Hoversten. “It will assist our students in paying for the hidden costs of college, such as model materials, printing costs, travel experiences and more.”
As a single parent, Marilyn funded her own education. She started her career cleaning houses, and she retired as a senior vice president with a Fortune 500 company. She and Jerry believe there is more to education than just the classroom. They are enthusiastic about enrichment opportunities for students. “With this gift, our hope is that students may broaden their view of the world a bit,” Marilyn says.
“We’ve had the good fortune to be successful in our careers, and we want to be good stewards of what we have,” adds Jerry. Both the Cooks feel that NC State has identified students through the Pack Promise program who need that extra level of support.
“I’m the luckiest guy you’ve ever met,” jokes Jerry. By accident, he submitted his NC State application to a UNC mailing address. Luckily, someone was watching out for him and forwarded the application to the correct school.
After his acceptance, he had the opportunity to visit two schools on campus: Design and Engineering. “I visited the design school, there was a lot of ‘life’ within the school, music playing, and everyone was happy,” he recalls. The college gave him tickets to go to the NC State vs. Wake Forest basketball game and sit in the cheapest seat in the house. “It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen in my life - it was a life-changing experience for me.”
With approximately 165 students in his high school, Jerry said only a few went to college, and fewer still graduated. Breaking that cycle and making sure that the current generation of students in the college have the support they need is important to the Cooks.
When asked about his legacy of giving, Jerry says that this
endowment is also in memory of one of the college’s most famous graduates - Ronald Mace. Ron, who coined the phrase “universal design,” was a contemporary of Jerry’s at school, which he attended each day in a wheelchair, dropped off by his mother. With his limited physical abilities, Ron made a difference in changing the world for so many people. He engaged in drafting North Carolina’s accessible building codes and continued to play a formative role in developing legislation that guaranteed accessibility for everyone, regardless of age, ability or status that has been adopted nationwide.
“No matter what our capabilities are, we all have some means of making improvements in the world. And both Marilyn and I feel we should ‘sow seeds of success’ in all the ways we can, as often as we are able.”
Jerry (second from right) and Marilyn (left) Cook pictured with Chancellor Randy Woodson (center), Dean Mark Elison Hoversten (right) and their nephew, Blake Sawyers (second from left).
A LOVE OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
Roxanne Hicklin spent her summers in between semesters as a fine arts student at Salem College as a sketch artist at Carowinds, capturing quick likenesses of people on the sidewalk before their attention wandered, along with their feet. Following graduation, she was able to parlay that skill into working at Channel 5 News as a courtroom sketch artist. Her ability to be adaptable and always learning on the job led her first to Channel 5, then to SAS, and finally landing as a volunteer and philanthropist at NC State, where she’s mentoring and nurturing a new generation of artists.
As an undergraduate student, Hicklin received a needs-based scholarship to attend Salem College, and so she wanted to support a student in the way that
she had been supported. When she first learned what the MADTech students were working on, she saw the skills she had to learn on the job throughout her career being taught in one place. “This is a challenging field and I want to support students who have the desire to push boundaries and see where that leads,” she adds.
Hicklin has come a long way since her days as a young college student sketching on the ground. But she hasn’t forgotten the impact that philanthropy made in her own life, and so she continues to find ways to support students across NC State and at her alma mater, Salem College. Forming the Roxanne Hicklin Scholarship for students in the College of Design is just one of many ways she is addressing that.
$420,531
Your generosity contributes to over $420,000 awarded to 105 undergraduate and graduate students this past academic year who, in many cases, would not be able to pursue higher education or complete a College of Design degree without this kind of investment. With ever-increasing need, your financial support truly makes a difference in the lives of our students.
43.2%
The number of undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need each year continues to rise, with 43.2% of students showing demonstrated need for the 2023-2024 academic year. An undergraduate student who has applied for financial aid is seeking $19,562 on average for that academic year.
While we are extremely grateful for the generosity of our alumni and friends, we still need your support to close the gap and provide every student requesting financial aid with the resources to succeed within our college. If you’re interested in giving to the College of Design, visit https://design.ncsu.edu/give/.
Roxanne Hicklin (center) with MADTech Department Head Derek Ham (left) and Anne Stutler (right).
THE FUTURE OF DESIGN IN TECHNOLOGY
How will technology continue to affect our role as designers? We interviewed two faculty in the College of Design to explore technology’s role as it relates to ideation, humanmachine teaming, and the impacts on our rights and resources.
CHRISTINE KLOCKE
Erisa Harris, a student in Protz’s Advanced Architectural Design Studio, used Unreal Engine to create Icelandic turf houses, a near-extinct but promising example of biogenic building technology. Erisa used photos and the AI texture generator Poly to create the digital turf material.
Is AI here to take over our jobs? We asked two faculty in the College of Design to explore the future of design within the realm of technology, and delve into some of the pros and cons of redefining their work with this endlessly-transforming industry.
While the nature of design has always been to explore, question, ideate, iterate, prototype, test and test again, newly emerging technologies related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to disrupt our current cycles of work and propose new roles for a future generation of students.
Helen Armstrong, a professor of graphic & experience design and director of graduate programs, has been researching in this space since 2015. One of the ways she’s preparing students at both the undergraduate and graduate level for this shift is to encourage students to continue to view their work as part of a larger system, rather than a one-off solution.
“When you design, you’re not designing something that finishes the moment your work is done,” she says. “The interfaces we’re designing today have to be able to interact with a whole ecosystem of other products within a spectrum of environments. These interfaces also have to anticipate and respond to user needs—before humans make requests. We are
entering an era of anticipatory design. For example, a few years ago our students worked with an auto parts company to integrate AI into their retail spaces. One of the solutions was an anticipatory maintenance application that identified customer vehicles and then enabled the sales team’s members to predict not only current maintenance needs but also near future and far future needs.
Exploring user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design means students must consider the end user of a product and consider the ways in which that user might interact with a product - whether that’s the interface you use to access your mobile banking or the notification you receive from your fridge, reminding you to buy milk. Each of these elements can talk to one another and respond to human needs, and there’s an inherent agreement of trust that humans place in the systems.
“Our research has found that people tend to begin by over-trusting autonomous systems, but if they disagree with the system’s prediction, then that trust begins to erode very quickly,” Armstrong says. So how can designers design the system to create a bit of skepticism and teach users more about how the machine might be making its prediction?
“Our research has found that people tend to begin by over-trusting autonomous systems, but if they disagree with the system’s prediction, then that trust begins to erode very quickly.”
HELEN
ARMSTRONG
A lot of that connection boils down to an ever-increasing need to understand data and being able to consider the larger implications of working with tools with a vast resource of computing power.
Shawn Protz, a professor of architecture and digital technology, compares the addition of AI to that of the practice of hand-drafting before programs like AutoCAD took over.
“I understand that shift in process affected the outcomes in how we make architecture – moving from hand-drafting to the computer,” he says. “The computer was always part of my education – we used hand-drafting to learn how to move from 2D to 3D, but I don’t think it’s changed
anything. The advances in BIM (building information modeling) garnered a lot of hype in the beginning, but now it’s just normal expected use. It was hyped as something new, but it was really just an extension of what we’d always been doing in architecture. We’ve been using abstractions like plans and sections to understand the complex spatial design, but it gave us the superpower of coordinating the way we draw and the way we think in three dimensions. I certainly had to learn some new software features, but everything just feels like an extension of what we’ve been trying to do this whole time. Even AI – I don’t see it as radically changing we’ve already been doing for centuries.”
With the addition of AI, students and professionals will be able to redefine what it means to iterate on a design or a series of designs. Protz sees it as a way to augment work processes, rather than removing part of the role. During a recent lecture at the College of Design, David Benjamin, founding principal at The Living and associate professor at Columbia’s GSAPP, shared his workflow of using machine learning in Grasshopper 3D (https://www. grasshopper3d.com/) to refine ideas and further his creative practice. “Benjamin sets up parameters and generates preliminary floor plans and can then work with his client to explore possibilities. So the work isn’t designing for you, but it’s allowing you to see what’s unexpected, what’s missing, and is another voice or agent, rather than something that might be replacing you,” Protz says.
This use of AI as an early idea generator in which the designer refines the final product is just one option for enhancing our
current workflows. While AI helps us grasp complexity and can augment the creative process, it has the potential for unwanted consequences as well.
“We need to be considering what human skills we’re automating away vs. what skills we could be shoring up through these systems,” says Armstrong. “Think about the GPS system in your car - its goal is to help you navigate from point A to point B. Often, this is great, but, sometimes, you would prefer the system to teach you how to better navigate between spaces yourself. Recently I worked on a project with Dr. Matthew Peterson in which we were thinking about this concept in relation to human memory. We worked with the NC State Laboratory for Analytic Sciences to consider how generative AI might be used to help an intelligence analyst capture and remember vital information. We weren’t using AI to replace human memory but rather leveraging the technology to increase analysts’ natural memory capacities. Each
time designers create an interface today, they make choices around automation that can either bypass certain human skills or team up with AI to expand those skills. That’s a very powerful position and a very heavy responsibility for designers right now,” she adds.
While the question of automation and future human abilities is one of the concerns for AI, another deals with the larger unexpected ramifications of this technology. Issues of bias, misuse of data and even intense usage of the earth’s natural resources all have implications in this field.
Armstrong sees her role as encouraging students to question their influence on the future of society. “I always tell my grad students - this is such a great time to be a student. We’re in the midst of figuring out what roles these systems can play in our future, and determining how we can build systems that support the future we want to live in,” she says.
Yash Shah, a student in the Master of Advanced Architectural Studies (MAAS) program, created a workflow with the generative AI platform Midjourney to visualize future scenes of the Matunga Market in Mumbai as an example of a vibrant and flexible model of urbanism and food production.
in ways that reinforce our highest values.”1
Both she and Protz point to guiding resources that are keeping a watchful eye on the future of this technology. Guiding principles such as the AI Bill of Rights (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-billof-rights/) and advocates such as the AI Now Institute (https://ainowinstitute.org/) continue to bring meaningful discourse and governance to this topic.
President Biden has recognized the potential impact unchecked technology advances could have on civil rights and democratic values, foundational principles to the United States of America. Based on this charge, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has identified five principles that should guide the design, use, and deployment of automated systems to protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence. The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights is a guide for a society that protects all people from these threats—and uses technologies
Armstrong encourages each of her students to read this document, and to think of it as a design brief. “Every paragraph is something that designers could be thinking about and working on right now,” she says. She gives an example from the section on Notice and Explanation, which focuses on letting end users know that they may be impacted by the systems they use. It’s a design question - how do designers develop UX/UI designs that can meet the expectations outlined in the AI Bill of Rights?
Protz is also exploring the ethical implications of some of these technologies, especially taking into consideration those that wield the power behind these mighty datasets. While guiding principles such as the AI Bill of Rights encourage the Notice and Explanation of the ways in which your data can be used, advocates such as the AI Now Institute point to the failure of big tech corporations to adhere to these “data
minimization” models of accountability.2 “This brings up all kinds of issues around privacy and bias that students need to be critically engaging with,” adds Armstrong.
Exploring some of these larger societal problems may be beyond the scope of architects, but there is more the profession could be doing to consider the ethical implications and the use of these tools when it comes to professional practice. Similar to considering the ways in which the built environment affects our climate and landscape, we should also consider the intense energy usage and water consumption3 that the data centers powering artificial intelligence need to churn out endless iterations for designs and visualizations.
Consistently pushing his students to be critical thinkers is part of Protz’ role as a professor. “I try to emphasize that all of these tools have a lineage and are part of a continuum of thinking,” he says.
Students Hannah Faub, Randa Hadi, Harrison Lyman and Matt Norton in Armstrong’s master of graphic & experience design class partnered with an auto parts company to explore how the company might ethically leverage machine learning to produce personalized, efficient, useful consumer interactions. The interface shows what a sales team member might see as an existing customer profile.
“Think about what the tool allows you to do, what it limits you from doing, and what opportunities or frictions does that create?” He feels that a large part of his role in the college is embracing and questioning new digital tools, being willing to try every new thing that comes out, and “just play around with it.”
Armstrong feels that some of the shifts into more reliance on AI will be so subtle to become invisible. “These capabilities are being unbundled and put into existing technologies. So it’s not like you go pick a special generative tool to get the output you want – they are being seamlessly incorporated into products so that we barely even know it’s happening.”
Understanding that these systems are
predictive and do not have a true sense of truth or meaning is something Armstrong underscores as important to this work. Having a healthy dose of skepticism as we continue to work with these tools encourages us to be aware of both their immense potential and their limitations.
That hearkens back to Protz’s goal to help students become critical thinkers. The College of Design is positioning its graduates to not only work with and explore the boundaries of new technologies such as AI, but to also step back and assess the roles in which these technologies have the power to shape our lives.
Both see AI as a huge shift in the means by which our work moves forward, with Armstrong likening the emergence of AI to
STUDENT PREDICTIONS
What future challenges do you think will affect your generation of designers?
STORY CONTRIBUTORS
the early days of the internet. The influence on the dissemination and processing of knowledge is profound, as is the ability to propagate false knowledge. Navigating that balance continues to be a space that designers can have influence on in the future.
“As long as humans are part of the equation, designers will be needed. Machines cannot truly understand the human experience. Moving forward, we need to be designing interfaces that enable humans and machines to work together to engage thoughtfully with the strengths of both,” says Armstrong. “This space is only going to be more important as we move forward.”
ELLIS
“I think that designers are going to have to think about bigger problems. We’ll have to do more design thinking around systems that we didn’t think of as traditional design.”
Helen Armstrong Helen Armstrong is the director of the master’s in graphic & experience design (MGXD) program and professor of graphic & experience design at NC State. Her research focuses on digital rights, human-machine teaming and accessible design. Her research partners have included IBM, Redhat, REI, Advance Auto Parts, SAS Analytics, Sealed Air and the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences.
Shawn Protz Shawn Protz is an assistant professor of architecture and digital technology. He has explored a range of subjects spanning from structural and environmental systems to digital representation and fabrication; past classes have covered design communication, building information modeling, climatic design, housing, inflatable architecture and tectonics. At NC State, Protz focuses on building a vibrant digital culture and developing coursework and research projects that explore emerging digital systems and materials.
Author: Christine Klocke Christine Klocke is the director of communications and marketing at NC State University’s College of Design. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
FOOTNOTES
1. “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy n.d. 2. “Data Minimization as a Tool for AI Accountability.” AI Now Institute, 2023. April 11. 3. “The Climate Costs of Big Tech.” AI Now Institute, 2023. April 11.
WAYS TO SUPPORT THE COLLEGE OF DESIGN
There are a variety of ways that you can support the College of Design! Did You Know? A pledge of $50k may be paid over a 5-year pledge period.
Gifts can be made in a variety of ways, either now or in the future:
• Make an outright gift via check, credit or debit card.
• Transfer appreciated stocks/securities
• If you are aged 70 ½ or older, transfer IRA Qualified Charitable Deductions (QCDs) or Required Mandatory Distributions (RMDs). This allows eligible individuals to reduce their taxable income and make a charitable gift by having funds directly transferred from their IRA to the NC State Foundation.
• Make a gift via donor-advised funds
• Include the College of Design in your estate planning as a will, life insurance, or retirement plan beneficiary
Scan the QR code to learn more about the ways you can support the College of Design via estate planning.
For more information or to have a confidential conversation regarding ways to support the College of Design, please contact Dwain Posey Teague, Executive Director of Philanthropy, at dpteague@ncsu.edu
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Stay connected with the College of Design! Whether you’re analog, digital, or somewhere in-between, learn about all of the ways our students Think and Do the Extraordinary.
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GIVE
Private support provides Design students unparalleled opportunities for innovative learning and academic growth while preparing them for a bright future to live a Designlife. Every gift, no matter the size, has an impact on the faculty, staff, and students of the College of Design. If you’re interested in giving to the College of Design, visit https://design.ncsu.edu/ give/.
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Want to stay connected with the College of Design? We would love to hear about new projects, promotions, and awards. Email Christine Klocke at chklocke@ncsu.edu to share your good news with us. Want our newsletter or other publications? Visit http://go.ncsu.edu/design-news to sign up!
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CONTACT
NC State College of Design Campus Box 7701 200 Brooks Hall Raleigh, NC 27695-7701 design.ncsu.edu
IN MEMORIAM
Henry Wood Johnston, Jr., age 85, passed away on January 16th, 2024. Henry graduated from the NC State College of Design in 1964, became an architect and practiced in seven states over a period of 50 years, retiring in 2014. He led a very successful career, beloved by his clients and respected by the engineers, contractors and artisans he worked with. Henry was renowned for his blend of design talent and technical expertise. He served as the president of AIA Wilmington Section twice and the treasurer of AIA North Carolina Chapter
Henry Wood Johnston, Jr.
Lynn Swisher Spears
1939 - 2024 1954 - 2023
for five years. Henry founded the firm of Johnston Architecture AIA, known for five decades of residential waterfront architecture on the North Carolina coast. A Sea Scout in his youth, he was an avid and accomplished lifelong sailor who enjoyed many voyages on the family sailboat, Charrette. Recognizing the impact of hands-on, comprehensive learning, Henry established an endowment for the School of Architecture’s Design + Build program in 2020, in memory of his late wife and fellow designer, Lorene.
Alumni who passed away in 2023-2024
Peter R. Norris ARE 1951
William H. Dove B.Arch. 1956
William O. Moore B.Arch. 1959
Sidney Swidler B.Arch. 1959
Alexander L. Carter, II B.Arch. 1963
Lynn Swisher Spears, former assistant professor of architecture, passed away December 13, 2023 after battling a months-long illness. Lynn Swisher Spears was born Roger Spears in Iowa in 1954. As Roger, she studied at Harvard and became an acclaimed architect in both Texas and North Carolina. (Her most notable work may have been the so-called “Darth Vader House,” a $4 million modernist masterpiece in Houston.) She also worked as an assistant professor at the College of Design at NC State. But there
Eugene W. Brown, AIA B.Arch. 1964
Henry W. Johnston B.Arch. 1964
W. Earl Long B.Arch. 1964
Joseph L. Nassif B.Arch. 1964 C. Lamarr Bunn BLA 1966
was a second chapter to Lynn’s eventful and impactful life. In her 60s, she courageously came out as a trans woman – and after retiring from her architecture career, she turned her attention to music. A multiinstrumentalist, Spears played with bands like Fair to Middlin’ and the Twang Bandits, wrote songs for a musical – and in 2022, Lynn capped her musical career with the 21-song double album “I Am,” bringing together an all-star lineup of local musicians and women vocalists. Adapted from an obituary written by Aaron Keck for Chapelboro.com.
John Davis Sims BPD 1968
Robert W. Ham B.Arch. 1970
Pat J. Holland B.Arch. 1971
David O. Bullock B.Arch. 1972
R. Frank Dalton Jr. B.Arch. 1972
Scott was a proud graduate of NC State University’s College of Design with a degree in art and design. Scott used his creative talents as a graphic designer at Epic Games. Earlier in his career, he was a motion designer at Myriad Media and McKinney. A quick wit and charming personality were trademarks of Scott’s so greatly enjoyed and appreciated by those who knew him well and his newest friends. His impeccable comedic timing provided laughter on so many occasions. His creativity shined
Scott McAfee Gaston 1933 - 2023
1987 - 2023
in the kitchen. Like any talented cook, Scott’s love language was sharing his cooking abilities with others. He also had great love for family and friends. Scott’s friend circle enlarged with his NC State experience and continued to expand as he entered the work force. As a compassionate people person, Scott would do anything for a friend. His loved ones are saddened that he ended his adventures much too soon and feel blessed to experience the time with him that they did.
Herbert Alan Smyser B.Arch. 1972
Bernard E. Dotson, Jr. B.Arch. 1975
David M. Lambert BEDA 1975
Louis Edward Skelton BEDA 1975
Robert F. Irwin MPD 1978
William “Bill” H. Dove, age 90, passed away on October 16, 2023. Bill was an exceptional architect who dedicated his talents to serving our state, church and nation. As the President of DKW Architects, he brought his creative and smart solutions to numerous projects, leaving a lasting impact on our communities. His passion for giving back extended beyond his professional life, as he served as President of the NC State Alumni Association and held trustee positions in various esteemed institutions such as Louisburg College and at Englewood United Methodist Church. Bill and his wife Jeanette’s commitment to
Henry C. Hammond, Sr. MLA 1978
David O. Montgomery, III BEDA 1985
Mark Peter Melaragno BEDA 1987
Kyle E. Troxell M.Arch. 1989
Scott McAfee Gaston BAD 2009
William “Bill” H. Dove
education was evident through their involvement in the Dove Caldwell Fellowship in the College of Design and Bill’s participation in the committees for Pitt Community College. He graduated from NC State in June 1956 and became a licensed architect in January 1957. He was honored with The Order of the Long Leaf Pine, where he held the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary, enjoying all the rights granted to members of this esteemed order. Bill’s contributions and dedication will always be remembered, and his impact will continue to inspire future generations.
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THINGS WE LIKE
Students in MADTech are leveling up their skills with like-minded student groups from William Peace University and Wake Tech Community College. Video game design has taken off at the College of Design and with a wide array of accessible software, curricula are being taught which include game platforms and logistics, applied game design concepts, aesthetics and worldbuilding, dynamics and gameplay, plus mechanics and development.
During the summer of 2023, the School of Architecture took on a gigantic (tiny) challenge. Over 11 weeks, nine students and four instructors experienced every stage of the design + build process by constructing their own tiny house on campus.
While students learned hard skills such as electrical rigging, plumbing and mechanical construction techniques, they also had a crash course in designing sustainable and affordable housing with a minimal footprint.
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Design students just Gogh for it. Claire Klish is a freshman studying Industrial Design. In the spring of 2024, she recreated Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” on an unused whiteboard in Leazar Hall. According to her, she started this semipermanent piece as a creative release to help lower stress throughout a challenging studio project. Understandably, it hasn’t been erased yet.
With the excitement of the Women’s and Men’s teams dominating March Madness, alumna Britt Davis [BID ‘09] wanted to create something for the Wolfpack community to celebrate this “Sweet” moment in the school’s history. Over the years she’s worked on mascot illustrations for clients and for her brand, LCKR ROOM (@lckr.room).