Sneak Peek: Meet the New DI Faculty Fellows

We launched the first cohort of the Design Innovation Faculty Fellows for the 2022/23 Academic year. This group of faculty members have each proposed collaborative innovation projects to tackle during their fellowship.  In addition, they meet regularly as a cohort group to share and discuss their progress on their ideas. This allows each person to gain feedback and insight from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, but also creates more opportunities for them to collaborate together to meet their shared/individual goals.

DI Faculty Fellows also help to co-teach some of the DI course offerings. This Fall, Bill Willoughby and Karen Mascolo have been co-teaching the Intro to Design Innovation course with J.R. Campbell.  In the Spring 2023 semester, each DI Faculty Fellow will be involved in a co-teaching team to support one of the four courses we are offering!

Here are some sneak peeks at each faculty member’s project directions:

Margarita Benitez: Margarita will be leading a group of faculty and students from any major who are interested in learning 3D garment creation and modeling so that they can submit designs to be reviewed for inclusion in an immersive virtual fashion show that will be pioneered in the DI HUB’s Blank_Lab.

Sheryl Chatfield: Sheryl has co-taught the Intro to DI course multiple times and is working on developing a graduate-level DI course that will be open to any graduate student to engage in to support their creative innovation and collaboration goals.

Molly Merryman: As one of the leading forces behind the Queer Britain museum, Molly is collaborating on a series of projects that center around conceptualizing and designing more thoughtful and inclusive environments to support LGBTQ individuals and communities. 

Karen Mascolo: Karen has been a champion for addressing incivility in the (nursing) workforce for many years.  For her DI Faculty Fellow project, she is focusing on utilizing 360 degree video to document clinical environments and experiences.  She will then utilize the immersive videos as layered training tools in virtual reality as a means to help build more awareness for nursing students both as participants and observers in these environments to more deeply investigate strategies for interaction and decision-making.

Gerrey Noh:  Gerrey is launching two projects - one focused on engaging a variety of students in composing sound experiences connected to poetic verses addressing indigenous people and perspectives. She is explore the creation of imagery through artificial intelligence tools that can be used to create an immersive performance experience in the Blank_Lab.  Gerrey is also leading a project where students can ‘hack’ traditional instruments and/or build new instruments in the DI HUB and then develop musical sound experiences from using these instruments.  Selected teams will be able to participate in a competition to create their own music videos from the experience in which they must incorporate their hacked/new instruments. 

Bill Willoughby:  Bill is working on a critical-design-practice project currently titled “A Study of Study.”  In this project he is investigating the question - ‘do we need to study anymore?’ and, “if so, what does /could study (especially in the context of architecture and environmental design) look like?”  He is engaging in this utilizing a ‘research through practice’ approach; allowing the work he generates to inform his awareness and direction through an emergent process to create the final work that will be shown in an exhibition format.

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Faculty and students participating in a workshop
Margarita Benitez (Fashion) leading the first “CLO3D Meet-up” for students interested in creating 3D runway garments for the virtual fashion show to be shown in the Blank_Lab in April 2023.

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Faculty member instructing students
Karen Mascolo (Nursing) co-teaching the Introduction to Design Innovation course.

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Faculty and student discussion in class
Bill Willoughby co-teaching the Intro to Design Innovation course in Fall 2022.

POSTED: Monday, October 31, 2022 08:46 AM
Updated: Friday, December 9, 2022 07:04 PM