Projects

SoVA student creating a digital model for class.

Innovation, collaboration and creativity across disciplines. Inside the studio, at a gallery, on stage or even at a local park. Projects in the College of Arts and Architecture involve faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, visiting professionals and often community members. While the details and locations may vary, enthusiasm and inspiration are guaranteed.

Smart Materials and Buildings The goal of the project is to use new technologies to support context-sensitive, responsive, or smart design at different scales.

Mass Customization and Grammar Studies The goal of this project is to develop the tools to support the mass customization of housing, work spaces, and daily use objects by addressing both the grammatical analysis of existing building and object types, as well as the development of design systems encoding new types.

LSD – Augmented Reality The L.S.D. project uses augmented reality in the densely populated space of the 14th St./Union Square station in the New York City subway system. In this high traffic area the idea was to launch three dimensional augmented reality spores (design inspiration from the work of Earnst Haeckel) throughout the station and allow people to react to them.

A Web App for Urban Pollinator Site Assessment This project presents a new web-based planting design tool for assessing urban pollinator habitat quality and resiliency.

Barrier for Outside Outpatient Testing of Heath The Barrier for Outside Outpatient Testing of Heath (BOOTH) is a structure designed at Penn State by a multidisciplinary team involving faculty, staff, and students from the College of Arts and Architecture and the College of Engineering, all working within the context of the university-wide MASC project.

Woven Water Filter The objective of this project is to design and develop a textile wearable such as a cloth backpack, scarf, or other clothing accessory which performs 2 critical functions.

Felt FELT is a 5’ x 6’ computational textile panel which was designed to understand what emotion gets communicated to people using vision and touch from a still and shape-changing textile.

From Costuming and Dancing Sculptures to Architecture This work describes a new approach to designing and fabricating costuming and dancing sculptures and the potential application of this system at the architectural scale.

Quantified Walk Project The project is to fabricate a pair of wearable leggings embedded with sensors, which can help identify a person’s a gait or walk.

Woven Light The Woven Light project is a solar fiber tension structure shade prototype that substitutes polymer fiber optic strands for solar photovoltaic [PV] strands to understand the problems and potential for PV fibers in fabrics.

Decoding and Recording Informal Settlements The World experiences a significant growth in population coupled with fast urbanization processes particularly in the Southern hemisphere, which puts an enormous pressure on cities, giving rise to numerous social, infrastructural, ecological, and urban problems.

Additive Manufacturing of Architectural Structures The project focuses efforts in three areas: development of a novel concrete formulation, development of the 3D printing processes, and design and development of the overall 3D printing system necessary to print large structures.