Materials

Relating to the physicality of a design object, the tactile qualities of a thing that is designed and how that relates to its potential uses. Designers work with materials to explore new levels of craft and innovation in their field, to potentially solve certain problems traditional materials couldn’t or to provide a new sensory experience for people to experience.

Nexus Podcast

Kennedy Yanko and Camille Bacon

Title: Season 3, Episode 2: We explore the relationship between art, spirituality, and abstraction with Kennedy Yanko and Camille Bacon, as they reflect on their professional practices in sculpting and writing, and on their explorations of visual perception and Black feminism.

Nexus Podcast

Dmitri Julius

Season 2, Episode 5: Dmitri Julius connects the dots between terrestrial, sustainable building practices and new technologies being developed for human habitation in outer space.

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Woven Light

Woven Light is a research project conducted by Felecia Davis at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State University’s College of Arts and Architecture from 2016 to 2018. The project, which aims to develop a prototype tensile structure...

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Woven Water Filter

Woven Water Filter is a research project initiated in 2016 by Felecia Davis at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State University’s College of Arts and Architecture. The objective of the project is to design and develop a...

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The Textile Mirror

Imagine you have just experienced an emotional event, and as you enter the room, the walls begin to recede and crumple into tight patterns reflecting the pain you feel inside. Perhaps you are implicitly broadcasting your emotions via sensors either...

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Phototropic Pavilion

This project is a foldable origami fiber composite surface. It can fold flat for easy packing and transport and is relatively lightweight. As a collaborative project our team developed a responsive textile by embedding conductive and resistive yarns into a...

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African Burial Ground

This proposal for museum and memorial for the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan marks this invisible space where African peoples and slaves were buried beginning in the 17th century at the margins of Dutch colonial New York. The burial...

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Felecia Davis

Trained as both an engineer and as an architect, Felecia Davis is known for her rigorous investigation of Architextiles. Or rather, using digital soft fabrication and computation, Davis studies the intersection of architecture and textile production in the pursuit of...

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Liz Ogbu

Although trained as an architect, Liz Ogbu often introduces herself as diverging from the normality of her field. This is because Ogbu does not (necessarily) design buildings. Instead, Obgu’s architectural practice is dedicated to the design of opportunities for impact;...