Class of 2020
Art + Design : News + Notes JUNE 2020
J. Robert and Barbara A. Hillier College of Architecture and Design New Jersey Institute of Technology
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HCAD Graduation Celebration Goes Online Typically, the Hillier College of Architecture and Design presents awards at a graduation celebration immediately following the NJIT commencement at the Prudential Center in Newark. Still operating within the parameters of New Jersey’s pandemic-related regulations, the College moved its celebration online in a livestreamed event that preceded the NJIT virtual commencement on June 12. Hosted by Michael Smullen, Executive Director of Alumni Relations, the ceremony included addresses from Dean Branko Kolarevic, Director of the School of Architecture Gernot Riether, Director of the School of Art + Design Glenn Goldman, and student speaker Chloe Blottman from Interior Design, as well as a slideshow display of student work from all graduates, and video messages from faculty and students. Following the presentation of awards, WebEx was used to create breakout rooms for students, friends, faculty, staff and alumni allowing for social mixing (from a distance) for each of the majors/programs with graduating students. A replay of the live event may be seen online at: https://news.njit.edu/see-it-again-virtual-commencementarchitecture-and-design
Congratulations Class of 2020
Industrial Design Student Daniel Meza Selected as Fulbright Scholar
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Fourth-year Industrial Design student Daniel Meza of Randolph, NJ, has been selected as the first Fulbright Scholar from the Hillier College of Architecture and Design and will attend Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia for two years starting in January 2021 where he will work with biologist Dr. Chris Reid to develop a method for creating furniture with slime mold. Taking advantage of unique attributes of having a design program embedded in a comprehensive technology-focused research university, Meza started to experiment with biological product design in studio with Industrial Design adjunct and furniture designer Charles Constantine. Working with Associate Professor Simon Garnier and Ph.D. student Subash Ray from Biology at NJIT, he received funding from NJIT’s Undergraduate Research and Innovation program to pursue his work. His goal is to create a reliable casting process with plastinated slime mold as a method of creating and developing a new sustainable material for furniture and other products.
NJIT Ranked as a Top School for Video Game Design by The Princeton Review and The Best Schools For the sixth time in seven years and the fifth consecutive year, The Princeton Review has listed NJIT as a top 50 undergraduate school in which to study video game design. The rankings are based on data collected from 150 schools offering game design coursework and/or degrees. According to The Princeton Review, “the selection and ranking of schools was based on criteria that broadly covered the quality of the faculty, facilities and technology.” The Princeton Review also factored in data it collected from the schools on their curriculum and career services. The Best Schools ranking for Video Game Design programs also lists NJIT as a top 50 school and stated that students in the Digital Design program “receive technical skills and creative opportunities to become leaders in the design field.”
Interior Design Student Nada Boules Wins 2020 NEWH Green Voice National Design Competition Third-year Interior Design student Nada Boules won the 2020 NEWH Green Voice Design competition of an adaptive re-use project for hotel/hospitality design with a project from a design studio taught by University Lecturer Julio Figueroa. Sponsored by the Network of Executive Women in Hospitality (NEWH), the competition emphasizes the use of sustainable design practices and products and requires the project to meet either LEED or WELL v2 standards. Boules proposed a hotel in the University Heights district of Newark at the corner of Central Avenue and Newark Street that would achieve Gold Certification for WELL standards. Her innovative solution would transform an unused parking garage into a superstructure holding 19 shipping containers that would then be designed as a hotel. Boules will receive a $7,500 scholarship and will attend the BDNY (Boutique Design New York) awards event in New York City in November.
Game design at NJIT is a collaboration between the Digital Design program in the School of Art + Design and the Information Technology program in the Department of Informatics, and is the top-ranked program housed in a public university in New Jersey in both rankings.
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Animation Career Review Ranks Digital Design as Top Animation Program in New Jersey For the second consecutive year, the Digital Design program at NJIT has been named by Animation Career Review as the top program in New Jersey to study animation. Additionally, NJIT was listed in the top 40 among public schools and colleges nationally and were in the top 25 on the East Coast. The program was also ranked in the top 20 nationally among schools offering an animation-related Bachelor of Arts degree. 192 schools were considered and the criteria to determine the rankings included “academic reputation, admission selectivity, depth and breadth of the program faculty, value as it relates to tuition and indebtedness, graduation rate, geographic location, and employment data.” The study of animation is embedded in the Entertainment Track of a generalized course of study in Digital Design. Art + Design Students Receive Innovation Grants Working with Associate Professor Taro Narahara, a pair of Digital Design students received innovation grants as part of the NSF I-Corps Site at NJIT organized by Associate Professor of Finance in the Martin Tuchman School of Management, Michael Ehrlich. The I-Corps grants provide funding “to teams interested in exploring the commercial viability of their ideas for products and businesses.” Fourth-year student Craig Gallo was awarded funding for “Feel and Experience Architecture: A Neuroscience Approach to Design” and third-year student Anthony Parker attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January in Las Vegas to conduct interviews with potential target customers as he worked on proposals to use virtual reality for architectural representations.
A multidisciplinary team led by Associate Professor Martina Decker of Architecture and Industrial Design and Professor Jay Meegoda of Civil & Environmental Engineering also received an I-Corps grant and worked towards the fabrication and commercialization of a bio-digester to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, generate renewable energy, and divert organic waste from landfills. The student team included Julia Flores and Ben Ruoff from Industrial Design, Kush Patel and Bruno Bezerra de Souza of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Katie Zhang from the Academy of Mathematics, Science & Engineering in Rockaway, NJ. 4
James Chao Wins A+D Medal
Miguel Rodrigues Featured on Artsy AF Podcast Digital Design adjunct faculty member and artist Miguel Rodrigues was featured in the podcast series by Artsy AF on February 10. The artist also known as Kaliptus had a wide-ranging discussion that included such topics as abstract painting, cyberpunk aesthetics, philosophy, Japanese “Tokusatsu” movies, alien design, the current visionary art movement, spa meditations for healing on downtime, and more. The podcast may be heard at: https://www.artsyafpodcast. com/episodes-1/kaliptus
James Chao of Morristown, New Jersey was awarded the 2020 Art + Design Medal, the highest honor the school, as determined by a vote of the faculty, offers to a graduating student. This is Chao’s second undergraduate degree after earning a Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Rutgers University in 2014. He also won the Award for Academic Achievement in Interior Design for having the highest academic average in the program during his undergraduate career at NJIT. He is a past recipient of the A+D Director’s Scholarship, and with two different projects took second place in both the 2019 Modernfold Workplace of the Future Design Competition and the 2020 IIDA Student Design Competition. Representing NJIT at NeoCon 2019 in Chicago, Chao was part of the first-place team in the annual IIDA Student Charette. He has worked for VLDG in Edgewater, TPG Architecture in New York City, and Tricarico Architecture and Design in Wayne, NJ. Prior to his work as an interior designer, he worked as a character and environment concept designer for Grenade Games.
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Kum-Biocca Presents at ACM Conference on Interactive Media Experiences Assistant Professor of Digital Design Hyejin Hannah KumBiocca presented “A Room with a ‘Fake’ View: Installing Digital Windows in Windowless Offices” at IMX 2020, the ACM Conference on Interactive Media Experiences, on June 18. Originally planned as an ACM/ SIGCHI conference in Barcelona, the work was presented remotely with Zoom and represents a collaboration with Assistant Professor of Informatics Donghee Yvette Wohn, and students Anisah Khandakar from Digital Design, and Astha Sharma of Human-Computer Interaction. The in-progress work studies quantitative measures of productivity and wellbeing before and after intervention, and shows that while the digital window elevated mood and subjective feelings of happiness, there was no significant effect on productivity.
Interior Design Students Win Awards at IIDA Regional Student Design Showcase and Competition Fourth-year student James Chao and second-year student Okhyun des Lauriers won second place and third place, respectively, in the annual Student Design Showcase and Competition: Chao for his independent project and des Lauriers for a four-week spring semester studio project. The competition, sponsored by the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware Chapter of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), was evaluated by a panel of professional judges and open to both graduate and undergraduate students. Normally held in Philadelphia in March, it was postponed due to coronavirus and held May 12 online. Interior Design students from NJIT’s School of Art + Design were the only undergraduate winners in the competition this year, and have received awards in the annual competition in three of the last four years.
Goldman Receives Photography Awards 5 competitions, 27 photographs, 33 awards. School of Art + Design Director, Glenn Goldman, received awards in a variety of categories and competitions that range from colorful mobile phone photography to monochromatic post-processed images taken with interchangeable lens cameras. Among the awards Goldman received are the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Awards (non-professional) in the category Architecture/ Industrial in the 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards for “Industrial Luxury” (London, England), “Paterson” (New Jersey), and “Catwalk” (Javits Center in New York City) respectively. He received additional awards and citations in various categories in the Moscow International Foto Awards, TZIPAC Zebra Awards (celebrating the art in black and white photography), 6th GoPix Exposée awards program for mobile phone photography, and Monochrome Awards program.
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Narahara Publishes and Presents Papers at IMQA 2020 and JSAI 2020 Associate Professor of Digital Design Taro Narahara co-authored a pair of papers for conferences this spring. “A Comparative Study of Date-Driven Approaches for the Generation of Floor Plans in Japanese Apartments” was co-authored with Xueting Wang and Toshihiko Yamasaki of the University of Tokyo for the Proceedings of The Tenth International Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications (IMQA). The conference, organized by the Image Media Quality Technical Group of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE), published proceedings only as presentations, scheduled for mid-March were cancelled due to the coronavirus. “Construction and Analysis of a Large-scale Attractiveness Dataset for Real Estate Floor Plans,” also co-authored with Wang and Yamasaki, was presented online June 10, 2020, at the 34th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). The authors collected their data for “evaluation through crowdsourcing by using nine statements that explore qualitative and functional values of apartments such as a level of comfort, perceived size, modernity, and so on.”
Interior Design Ranked as Top Program in New Jersey by Niche. com and Universities.com The Interior Design program continues to garner top rankings and has been listed as the top program in New Jersey for 2020 according to both Niche.com and Universities.com. Niche evaluates programs based on academics (40%), value (27.5%), quality of professors (7.5%), campus (5%), diversity (5%), student life (5%), and more. Universities.com aggregates data from government sources, student surveys, interviews with graduates, and applies editorial review.
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ABC’s Shark Tank Gives Two Separate Deals to Industrial Design Instructor and Alumnus Just two weeks apart, product designer and adjunct faculty member in Industrial Design Krystal Persaud and 2014 Industrial Design graduate Ryan Cruz each scored separate deals on ABC’s Shark Tank. On a show that premiered on March 21, Persaud struck a deal with Mark Cuban. She introduced her New York-based start-up company, Grouphug, to the panel and showed her Window Solar Charger, a 10-watt panel with 3400 mAh battery. The debut on Shark Tank was so successful, that only 12 hours after the episode aired, her website showed a twomonth wait for her now backordered item. Two months later, on May 20, Mark Cuban was lending his personal touch to the endeavor and appeared on a “Grouphug Playdate,” an online Q&A streamed live. Prior to starting Grouphug, Persaud was Senior Director of Product Design & Strategy at littleBits, an innovative toy company and she recently taught toy design in a Collaborative Design Studio to fourthyear students in the School of Art + Design. Two weeks after Persaud’s success on the show, Ryan Cruz along with his brother Eric Cruz and friend Kevin Zamora, pitched their product and new shoe company Muvez, and got a deal with Daymond John receiving a $200,000 investment. The removablesole shoe and slipper is a derivative of a product Cruz worked on in his thesis studio in Industrial Design with his studio critic, Coordinator of the Industrial Design program, Jose Alcala.
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NJIT Hosts Global Game Jam for 10th Consecutive Year For the tenth year in a row, NJIT’s multidisciplinary game design program was a host site to the Global Game Jam. With approximately 90 registered jammers, NJIT had the largest of five sites in New Jersey and was one of the largest U.S. sites hosted by a public university. Alumni and students from the Digital Design and Information Technology programs came together for a 48-hour adventure that started Friday afternoon January 31 and finished by 6 PM Sunday February 2. Normally held in the School of Art + Design facilities, the site moved to the laboratories and lounges in the Guttenberg Information Technologies Center due to ongoing renovation and construction in Weston Hall, home to the Hillier College of Architecture and Design. The theme this year was “Repair” and the teams at NJIT produced 14 games during the event. Adjunct faculty Jessica Ross-Nersessian and Monica Nelson participated with students and represented the School of Art + Design during the weekend. 2020 represented the 12th year for the Global Game Jam with 48,753 participants worldwide producing 9,601 games distributed to 934 distinct sites in 118 countries. Associate Professor of Architecture and Design Andrzej Zarzycki was part of the international volunteer effort and served as the regional organizer for the Midwest USA.
International sponsors included Microsoft, Unreal Engine, Facebook, Buildbox, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Houdini, and others. In addition to NJIT, popular school sites in the United States included Art Institute of Houston, Cogswell Polytechnical College, Duke University, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, New York University, Northeastern University, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, University of Southern California, and University of Texas – Austin.
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Digital Design Student Group Remains Active Throughout Semester The School of Art + Design has an active chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH that programs independent activities to include guest lectures, field trips to offices and studios, and tutor/help-sessions for students in the Hillier College of Architecture and Design. In January, NJIT SIGGRAPH hosted a video call on campus with Mindy Berardini, Recruiter and Talent Development Associate from Blue Sky. A few weeks later, a group travelled to the Jump Into the Light VR Cinema, PlayLab and Studio in New York City for a VR Art Fest and Tournament and freshman Patricia Patalinjug participated in the VR drawing tournament. Once everyone was sent home after spring break, the organization continued to hold online streamed meetings every Wednesday through April hosting workshops for students. A Character Creation Workshop was hosted by Brandon Kong and Nicholas Seccondro during which they discussed the process of using ZBrush, Maya, and Substance Painter to create a character. 2019-2020 NJIT SIGGRAPH President Michael
DeCaprio presented a 3D Compositing Workshop using After Effects and Cinema 4D. Max Hafen and alumnus Alex Schuppel ’19 streamed a VFX Workshop focusing on Houdini. Although the workshops were software-specific, all presenters spoke about those processes and procedures that transcend any specific software application or version. In an effort to maintain social communication and the collaborative spirit of design studio as everyone went into quarantine, the group used their Discord server to open up two new streaming channels that any student could enter to show what they were working on and participate in ad hoc peer critiques. To their delight, the new online distributed format made it easy for Digital Design alumni to drop in and participate. NJIT SIGGRAPH named a new executive board for 2020-2021: Kaylin Wittmeyer (President), Suzanne Hlinka (Vice President), Nisha Mistry (Secretary), James Wisniewski (Treasurer), Max Hafen and Brandon Kong (Tutoring Managers), Anisah Khandakar and Jada Wypasek (Marketing Managers), and Jordan Mikhail (Communications Manager). The group is advised by Interim Coordinator of Digital Design and Director of the School of Art + Design, Glenn Goldman. SIGGRAPH is a special interest group of the Association of Computing Machinery for computer graphics and interactive techniques. 10
Third Year Industrial Design Studio Exhibits Furniture at Canal Street Market Students from the furniture design studio, a thirdyear Industrial Design studio taught by adjunct and American Design Club director Kyle Mead, exhibited a curated selection of the products they designed at the Canal Street Market in New York City’s Chinatown at the conclusion of the fall semester. The exhibit, “Purpose & Worth,” included projects by Hope Deys, John Fajardo, Julia Flores, Patrick Keating, Katrina Macaro, Nicole Papas, Elizabeth Spencer, and Claire Wagner were shown.
Spring Career Fair Attracts Interior Design and Architecture Students Leveraging alumni connections in architecture and interior design, the February Career Fair was well attended by students in those fields, many of whom were able to speak about potential internships and post-graduation employment opportunities with NJIT alumni representing different companies. Among the firms represented and recruiting were AECOM, Arcari + Iovino Architects, Brick Studios, CallisonRTKL, DMR Architects, Elkus Manfredi Architects, Gensler, HDR, Parette Somjen Architects, Perkins and Will, Perkins Eastman, Peter Raymond Wells Architects, Sargenti Architects, Tricarico Architecture and Design, and Ware Malcomb.
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Interior Design Studio Inhabits Virtual Projects With a grant from Hillier College, a second-year Interior Design studio taught by Professor Glenn Goldman allowed every student to work in virtual reality for the entire semester. All of the students were issued an Oculus Rift S to pair with their own high-end, VR-ready workstations (predominantly Lenovo 520c ThinkStations with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards) and were able to virtually walk through and inhabit their projects at any/every step during the design process using a combination of Autodesk Revit and Enscape. Visiting critics included Vina Soliman and Banafsheh Soltani ‘12 of Gensler and Adam Raiffe ’12 of RAIF Designs, LLC. Because an entire studio was participating, there were enough experiences for everyone to come to some reasonable conclusions about the efficacy of designing in virtual reality. Students and critics casually talked about being “in” the space as if they had visited the project physically. They also remarked how the ability to go in their spaces whenever they wanted enabled them to find and fix problems early in the project and minimized unwanted surprises, even in a short-term project. But they also found that wearing the headsets for more than three minutes at a time resulted in discomfort and dizziness. While one project was created during a normal studio environment, the second project was designed entirely after classes were moved online. The studio continued to be taught synchronously through electronically mediated platforms WebEx and Google Meet with no appreciable change in student outcomes.
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Schwartz Presents at SimAUD 2020 Online Conference Assistant Professor of Industrial Design Mathew Schwartz presented “Evaluating Jogging Routes in Mass Models” at the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Design (SimAUD) 2020 online conference in May. With expertise in ergonomics and human factors, Schwartz proposed an “an evaluation of the virtual environment to a designer that encompasses the availability of comfortable jogging routes.” Going beyond the typical evaluation of point-to-point travel when designing environments, Schwartz introduced the issue of recreational movement where the start and end points of travel were the same, which then required additional objective criteria like sun/shade and glare to be considered when making qualitative judgments and/or design decisions.
A+D Alumni Serve on IIDA Regional Board of Directors A pair of alumni from the School of Art + Design have been tapped to serve on the 2019-2021 Board of Directors and Administration for the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware Chapter of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA). Chelsea Chamra ‘16, an interior designer at Ware Malcomb, has been named Director of Administration and Matthew Negron ’13, Design Project Manager for Dauphin North America and an adjunct at NJIT teaching Sustainable Materials and Processes, is serving as the New Jersey City Center Director.
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It’s Not All Zoom and Gloom It has been more than seven years since I stepped out of character while writing the Art + Design newsletter. The last time our community was disrupted occurred with Superstorm Sandy and NJIT closed on October 29, 2012. But with heroic efforts from staff, students, and faculty, our classes resumed on November 5. The suffering, nonetheless, was real as people lost their homes and just getting to and from campus was filled with obstacles. I felt the need at that time to reinforce the importance of our community. But as bad as that was, it was a natural disaster the likes of which had been seen before. And it was localized. This is so different. We are dealing with issues of an almost biblical nature. A pandemic, or plague, spread across the globe and NJIT put work-from-home protocols into effect on March 12, 2020. New Jersey was one of the hardest hit states in the country with approximately 12,800 deaths and 168,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 by mid-June. More than three months after this started, we are inching back to a different type of normal in the United States. Accompanying the danger to our physical health came a three-month quarantine that battered the emotional and financial health of everyone in our community in some manner. During all this we were also told of an impending invasion of “murder hornets” (Vespa mandarinia) coming to the United States. And of course, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, have made evident that sustained systemic racism is still present and a danger to a just society. It would be easy to give up and bemoan our individual and collective fates. Friends and family members have lost jobs and some have lost their lives. Absolutely nothing about this is good. We were sent home in March and moved our classes, meetings, and social circles to WebEx, Google Meet, Discord, and Zoom. There was an abundance of gallows humor as people tried to get through everything. Moreover, this is far from over. The classroom settings people return to in September will be unlike the ones we left. Some classes will stay online. Some will transform to hybrid courses that will mix a combination of in-person face-to-face learning and work with modules (asynchronous and/or synchronous) available online. There won’t be much hugging, or even shaking hands, in the near future. Yet, in spite of everything, and in contrast to reports from other places, students and faculty in the School of Art + Design not only persisted, but exhibited a camaraderie and collaboration that enabled, for the most part, timely completion of the spring semester. Faculty were routinely spending 50% more time with students “in studio” online to make sure everyone, to the greatest extent possible, got the attention they needed. Final reviews moved online. Students showed extraordinary flexibility (and evidence of skill and preparation) moving from platform to platform and software application to software application depending on the class, the interest of the teacher, and sometimes just to make things work when one thing or another was disrupted. What resulted was some of the strongest design work created in a single semester at the School of Art + Design. The trick will be to sustain this effort as we all adjust to different circumstances. It may or may not be complicated. It is definitely not easy and there are not a lot of options out there. But adjust we must. And adjust we will because we are a community of designers. And designers build, create, solve problems, and make the community and the world a better place. It’s who we are, it’s what we do. We bring art and beauty to the world because that is what makes us human. We do this because it addresses our spirit and will enable us to move forward. We do this so we can live. I hope that everyone and their families have a safe and healthy summer and I look forward to the time when we can all be together without worry. Glenn Goldman, FAIA, IIDA Director, School of Art + Design
School of Art + Design Hillier College of Architecture and Design New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, NJ 07102-1982 https://design.njit.edu/ 14