Good design matters.

If you're around the @durhambulls stadium this weekend, celebrate #Juneteenth with a new mini-exhibit developed by Art + Design Department Head Derek Ham and students Mustafa Ozcicek (Ph.D. in Design), Elyse Hill, and Niyana Haney (undergraduates in Art + Design).

With the help of a grant from the NC State Foundation, the team designed an augmented reality (AR) compatible mini-museum that gives a new perspective on the history and legacy of Negro League Baseball icon, Buck Leonard.

Walter Fenner “Buck” Leonard is largely considered the greatest Negro Leagues 1st baseman of all time. From 1934 to 1950, he captained the great Homestead Grays of the Negro National League to 10 league championships and 3 Negro Leagues World Series titles. He played in a record 12 All-Star games, earning a reputation as one of the game’s most feared hitters and greatest all-around stars.

Though he never played in the Major Leagues, he has been considered one of the top 50 baseball players of all time and was among the first 3 Negro Leaguers elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

A native of Rocky Mount, NC, Leonard was arrested as a kid for simply looking through a fence. Ham knew this was an important AR element, and this display allows you to see through the fence, much the way Leonard would have.

Ham, along with the Buck Leonard Association for Sports and Human Enrichment (@buckleonardassociation) hope to showcase the mobile exhibit across multiple locations throughout North Carolina to highlight and uplift the history of Black trailblazers in baseball and revive baseball in inner cities. ...

Say hello to Anusha and Caroline (@anushacarolinetravels) who are currently on an architectural expedition in Latin America! ⬇️✈️🏙🏛🗺🇦🇷🇨🇴🇪🇨🇲🇽

Anusha and Caroline are both recent B.Arch. graduates @ncstate_architecture as well as recipients of the Duda Travel Fellowship.

The fellowship affords new architecture graduates the opportunity to travel abroad, make discoveries and connections, and then share their findings with the College of Design community.

Through their travels and research, Anusha and Caroline hope to gain an understanding of how architecture, urban development and preservation projects have shaped the identities of four cities in Latin America.

By studying the architecture of the past in these cities, they will be asking these questions:

🔴 What has been preserved and why? What narratives or identities do these acts of preservation serve?
🔴 How does this play into collective memory?
🔴 What has changed throughout contemporary architecture in these cities?
🔴 Who does the architecture serve? Who does it not?
🔴 What identity is being created and what does that say about today's cultural and political climate?

They will visit and document numerous buildings, parks and large-scale infrastructure projects throughout their trip.

So far they have visited over 20 sites that have informed our research into these unique cities. They have also been engaging with the local culture by visiting art museums, dance shows, artisan markets and eating traditional foods.

Furthermore, they are connecting with architecture, urbanism and preservation professionals to understand the perspective of those who live in these cities.

Keep up with the duo's travels by following them @anushacarolinetravels. We're looking forward to their return and hearing all about what they've learned along the way! ...

From @ncsutechnician:
"The return of in-person camps and pre-college programs revives campus summer" 📰 👀

Design Lab (@ncstatedesignlab), the College of Design’s outreach program, is hosting four camps throughout the summer for middle and high school students interested in learning more about design.

Their middle school day camp for rising sixth through eighth grade students will take place on campus June 27 to July 1 and again Aug. 8-12. This camp focuses on design thinking and the design process and gives students exposure to all disciplines of design.

The high school day camp for rising ninth through 12th grade students will also occur Aug. 8-12 and will give students the opportunity to work on several studio projects in different disciplines throughout the week.

Ashley Davis, the director of pre-college programming for Design Lab, said these camps are vital for increasing access and exposure to design before college.

“Design Camp is really about informing students about the study of design and trying to help raise awareness of the impact of design,” Davis said. “Design really does impact everybody's lives every day, so our programming is a great place for students to learn, get some experience with design, introduce themselves to design and explore the different fields within design.”

Design Lab hosts two residential camps: one for rising 10th through 12th grade students July 10-16 and Design Immersions for rising 11th and 12th grade students July 24-30. These camps give older high school students a realistic taste of campus life and an opportunity to engage on a deeper level with counselors and faculty as well as with their projects.

Read the full story - link in bio.
📸: Snapshots from the 2019 Design Camp summer program. It was the most recent session in which students attended summer programming on campus. ...

If you were to visit Allred Gallery on the College of Design’s campus during the fall semester of 2021, it’s entirely possible that you would have seen the room’s large windows covered in marker and post-it notes.

And, if you read the contents of those notes out of context, you may have been curious as to why design students are musing over scribbles that read “no privacy,” “tracking -> stalking,” and “enviro/doomsday.”

These notes are not from an outline of a dystopian television series – they’re the first steps in designing an accessible user interface for autonomous vehicles, or AVs.

AVs have seen a significant increase in interest and development over the past decades. Personal vehicles have begun to incorporate autonomous features such as parking and lane-keeping assistance, as well as fully automated systems such as braking, steering and acceleration. NC State even launched its own driverless shuttle on Centennial Campus in 2020.

The current technology still is not perfect, nor is it widely accessible. But Professor Helen Armstrong’s 400-level graphic design studio has tasked students with designing for the AV experience in the near future with a wider audience in mind.

“The projects taught in this studio are meant to challenge these students and to be extremely future-facing,” says Armstrong. “There are endless applications for software in an autonomous vehicle. That kind of access to experience and very discipline-specific knowledge would not be as attainable without an industry partner like Red Hat.”

@redhatinc, a homegrown tech company known for its work in edge computing and open-source software, sponsored the studio by sending its own team of user experience (UX) designers to brainstorm and collaborate with students.

Check out the full story and see the student work in our bio. ...

Emily McCoy, associate professor of practice @ncstatelaep, has been flying drones across campus for the past five years. But she’s capturing more than the beauty of the landscape. 🗺📊

McCoy and the students in her landscape performance class have been using tools such as drones with thermal cameras to evaluate how different landscapes across campus perform from a sustainability standpoint.

The drone-based research project will help identify the ways in which different landscapes and designs can mitigate the negative impacts of urban heat islands across campus.

“Built infrastructure in urban areas, such as buildings and sidewalks, often gets pockets of heat that, in Raleigh, can sometimes be 20 degrees hotter than a more rural area outside of the city boundary,” said McCoy. “These pockets of urban heat can exacerbate the issue of energy use so that buildings have to work harder and use more energy to cool, and are also linked to health concerns such as asthma.”

Students compared traditional landscape designs on campus, such as lawns and walkways, to the more biodiverse designs built by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning’s hands-on @ncsudesignbuild program. The findings showed that Design + Build’s landscapes — which include rain gardens outside Syme Hall — are more effective than traditional landscapes at managing stormwater, mitigating the urban heat island and providing respite for students and faculty.

Full story in our bio. ...

Hard to believe it's only been two weeks since you started the next chapter in your journey.

On the bright side, we can still take a trip down memory lane together ❤️

Check out the link in our bio for some of our favorite moments from commencement 📸🎓. ...