Derek Ham has taught design in a variety of contexts: architecture, graphic design, industrial design, computer animation, game design, and more. In each of these disciplines, Ham introduces play as an informal learning method to teach design. For Ham, play is an algorithmic framework for teaching creativity in design – one that has a foundation in shape grammars and allows us to think of designs as the outcomes of playful calculation. Ham is currently the department head of art and design, associate professor of graphic design and affiliated assistant research professor of architecture at North Carolina State University. In addition, he founded Logic Grip, an NC State official startup spun out of the College of Design’s Mixed Reality Lab (MxRLab). Before joining the faculty of the College of Design at NC State, he taught at the MIT School of Architecture, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Ham’s research interests span the areas of game-based learning, algorithmic thinking, and digital fabrication/making. In his current work, he investigates both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality technology to find ways these tools can expand the possibilities of interaction design toward new forms of storytelling and scholarship. In 2017, Ham began creating an immersive VR experience of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike during the Civil Rights Movement. The I Am A Man VR Experience was released in 2018 (the 50th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination), allowing a first-hand experience of a pivotal moment in American history. The project was funded by Oculus and earned numerous film festival awards. A second project, Barnstormers: Determined to Win, is a forthcoming interactive VR experience of historical fiction providing an interactive narrative of the stories of players in the Negro Baseball League, such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck O’Neil.

+++more on Derek’s work:
Logic Grip
I Am A Man
Mixed Reality Lab at NC State

+++links to resources discussed in the episode:
Forming Spatial Narratives lecture at MIT
The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schön

+++listen and subscribe here or on Apple Podcasts:

Shelby Doyle is an associate professor of architecture and Stan G. Thurston Professor of Design Build, co-founder of the Computation & Construction Lab (CCL), and director of the Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL) at the Iowa State University College of Design. The CCL and ARL are the result of Doyle’s Presidential Impact Hire at Iowa State to rethink digital fabrication and design-build. The CCL works to connect developments in computation to the challenges of construction through teaching, research, and outreach.

The central hypothesis of CCL and Doyle’s work is that computation in architecture is a material, pedagogical, and social project; computation is both informed by and productive of architectural cultures. This hypothesis is explored through the fabrication of built projects and materialized in computational practices. The CCL is invested in questioning the role of education and pedagogy in replicating existing technological inequities, and in pursuing the potential for technology in architecture as a space of, and for, gender equity.

+++more on Doyle’s work:
ccl.design.iastate.edu
instagram.com/isu_ccl

+++links to resources mentioned in the episode:
*** Authorial Assymetries
*** Computational Feminism
*** Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice
*** Equity in Computing
*** Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing by Mar Hicks
*** SOM’s Computer Group: Narratives of women in early architectural computing
*** The Digital Now
*** Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
*** Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
*** Medieval Robots Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E.R. Truitt
*** Recoding Gender Women’s Changing Participation in Computing by Janet Abbate
*** Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulcene by Donna J. Haraway
*** Wall-E as Sociological Storytelling

+++listen and subscribe here or on Apple Podcasts:

 

Huiwon Lim is an assistant professor of graphic design at Penn State. He previously served as a lecturer at Iowa State University, which is where he earned his M.F.A. in Graphic Design, a graduate certificate in human-computer interaction, and a master’s degree in environmental graphic design. Lim’s interests lie in visual communications, environmental graphic design, brand experience, human-computer interaction, user experience design, visualizing information, and exhibition design.

During his time in Ames, Iowa, Lim taught undergraduate courses in graphic design, core design, and interdisciplinary design. He was also named a recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award in 2017. As a student, he won the Best of Category, Environmental Graphic Design Award at the 58th Annual Art Director’s Association of Iowa Design Exhibition in 2016. Lim is a member of AIGA and the Society for Experiential Graphic Design.

A native of Gunsan, Korea, Lim has a bachelor’s degree in art and engineering from the Handong Global University in Pohang, Korea.

+++more on Lim’s work:
hewantsdesign.com

+++listen and subscribe here or on Apple Podcasts:

Karla Saldaña Ochoa is an Ecuadorian architect with a Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture from ETH Zurich. In June 2021, she finished her Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, which investigated the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence to have a precise and agile response to natural disasters. Saldaña Ochoa is a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida where her teaching and research focus on investigating the interplay of AI and human intelligence in architectural practices at building and urban scales.

Saldaña Ochoa is the leading researcher at the Spatial Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Research & Experimentation (SHARE) Lab, a research group focused on developing human-centered AI projects on design practices. The research of the lab focuses on the relationship between human intelligence and AI, knowing that one complements the other, with AI being able to augment human physical and intellectual capabilities. SHARE Lab work aims to address how architects might include such technologies in a design workflow while preserving their role as a creative entity.

+++more on Saldaña Ocho’s work:
www.ai-share-lab.com

+++links to resources mentioned in the episode:
*** On Defining Artificial Intelligence
*** Beyond typologies, beyond optimization: Exploring novel structural forms at the interface of human and machine intelligence.
*** Atlas of AI.

+++listen and subscribe here or on Apple Podcasts:

“Voices in Design Computing” is a podcast that explores what design computing is and how diverse designers from different disciplines and backgrounds are grappling with computational thinking and technologies to open new potentials in design. The first season consists of five episodes, which will be released bi-weekly starting on Jan. 26, 2022. Each episode is in an interview format hosted by Heather Ligler.

The schedule and episode guests are outlined below. Each episode will be released at this site – please subscribe and stay tuned!

Jan. 26 – EPISODE 001 // Interview with Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State.

Feb. 9 – EPISODE 002 // Interview with Karla Saldaña Ochoa, assistant professor of architecture and leading researcher at SHARE lab, University of Florida School of Architecture.

Feb. 23 – EPISODE 003 // Interview with Huiwon Lim, assistant professor of graphic design, Stuckeman School at Penn State.

March 9 – EPISODE 004 // Interview with Shelby Doyle, associate professor of architecture, Stan G. Thurston Professor of Design Build, co-founder of the Computational and Construction Lab and director of the Architectural Robotics Lab, Iowa State University College of Design.

March 23 – EPISODE 005 // Interview with Derek Ham, department head of art and design, associate professor of graphic design and affiliated assistant research professor of architecture, North Carolina State University College of Design.