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DOE-funded project investigates climate change effects on low-income housing

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Coastal cities such as Baltimore expect to see increased impacts of climate change, such as severe flooding, heat stress and increased energy consumption, particularly in low-income communities. Researchers from Penn State’s Hamer Center for Community Design are part of a Department of Energy (DOE)-funded effort to study the effects of climate change on the built environment and how American cities can equitably mitigate these events.

The Hamer Center for Community Design, which is housed in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, serves as a laboratory for community partnerships that integrate socio-economic and environmental conscious resolution to design and planning problems. Co-principal investigators on the project are Rahman Azari, associate professor of architecture and director of the Resource and Energy Efficiency (RE2) Lab, Lisa Iulo, associate professor of architecture and director of the Hamer Center for Community Design, and Hong Wu, associate professor of landscape architecture and director of the Stormwater Living Lab.

“Ken Davis, the principal investigator, learned about this potential DOE opportunity before the actual request for proposals was issued, and he immediately brought it to the Water Council,” said Wu, who was co-chair of the council with Davis, professor of atmospheric and climate science. “We then put a call to action out to faculty that we thought may be a good fit, and Ken highlighted that the expertise that we have in the Stuckeman School, particularly with the built environment, was something unique Penn State could bring to the table.”

That expertise is being provided by Azari, who will co-lead the buildings and energy sub-team of researchers on the project; Iulo, who will co-lead the community engagement cross-cutting priority area team; and Wu, who will co-lead the decision science and equitable pathways sub-team.

Azari said the team was looking to understand the effects of climate change on architecture and, more specifically, its effect on low-income housing structures in Baltimore.

“We are interested in the complex interrelationships between climate change, indoor air quality, air quality in general and energy consumption of the buildings and how the design of such buildings could be a medium to reduce energy consumption, improve air quality and, ultimately, improve the health of the occupants living there,” he said.

Azari stressed the importance of developing a connection between the researchers on the project, who represent a number of different disciplines, the communities affected in Baltimore and also practitioners who need to take climate change into consideration when designing buildings.

“For me, I am interested in determining how climate change and future uncertainties affect the way we design buildings,” he explained. “How can we include the users of the buildings and the people who live there in the design process so we can see what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to climate change? We will use those answers to then create new models for how we think about design.”

Iulo explained that the Baltimore project is a natural progression of the work the Hamer Center has been doing in local flood-prone communities, such as Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Baltimore has approximately 52 miles of shoreline, which can rise dramatically during certain weather conditions.

“Baltimore is part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed area, fed largely by the Susquehanna River Basin, and is representative of many communities that the Hamer Center has worked with, so we have a real opportunity here to further our impact with Baltimore.” she said. “Working with our other University partners, national laboratories and the U.S. Forest Service, we’re looking forward to engaging in Baltimore to involve communities in the process of exploring solutions to the climate change challenges they are facing.”

The pilot project in Selinsgrove looks to inform solutions throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, said Iulo.

“Being able to work in Baltimore, to work with Hong and other sub-teams on water quality and quantity issues, I think is very much aligned with the work we’ve been doing in the Hamer Center,” she said.

Wu brings expertise in the landscape architecture realm, particularly in integrating green infrastructure as solutions to urban climate resilience. Her current green stormwater infrastructure research focuses on investigating the environmental, social, and economic aspects of green stormwater infrastructure across different social and environmental contexts.

She will look at integrating community input into developing equitable climate mitigation and adaptation methods and test them under various future scenarios in the integrated modeling system that the large group will develop.

“I think the Stuckeman School faculty make unique contributions to this project in that we try to connect scientific research to real-world problem-solving,” she said. “The key role for us is to ask, ‘What are the effective traditional and novel solutions that the communities desire for enhancing climate resilience in Baltimore and how do we test those solutions in our modeling and assess how well they work?”

The goal of the Penn State team is to both provide a model for community-oriented, interdisciplinary urban science that promotes climate solutions, and to educate a new generation of urban scientists so they are capable of engaged-community planning in the face of climate change in urban areas across the United States.

Davis is leading the Penn State team that received $6.4 million for the project and includes 21 faculty members from seven different colleges and 12 different departments. They join counterparts from Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Virginia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Drexel University, City University of New York and the U.S. Forest Service in studying effects of climate change on the city of Baltimore.

Penn State

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Architecture professor honored with Cooper Hewitt National Design Award

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture in College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, has been named the winner of the 2022 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in the Digital Design category for her work that explores the use of computational textiles.

Established in 2000, the National Design Awards recognize those leaders in nine design categories – Design Visionary, Climate Action, Emerging Designer, Architecture/Interior Design, Communication Design, Digital Design, Fashion Design, Landscape Architecture and Product Design – as determined by a multidisciplinary jury of practitioners, educators and leaders from a wide range of design fields.

A lead researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB), Davis’s research reimagines how people might use textiles in their daily lives and in architecture through computational textiles, which respond to the environment via programming, embedded sensors and electronics, as well as use the natural transformable properties of textiles.

Davis was recognized by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for her “innovative design of digital products, environments, systems, experiences and services.”

“This award was a great surprise, and I am honored to be among such respected colleagues in the 2022 National Design Award cohort,” said Davis. “Receiving this award is especially encouraging in that it recognizes a body of work that has been happening over a number of years.”

Davis said she feels like feels like it has taken a while to get her works off the ground because most everything she does is prototyped with real materials. In addition, coming from architecture, that has also meant prototyping at scale.

“The award is also important to me in that it recognizes digital work that is about human interaction with textile material that has been fabricated with digital tools, embedded with digital sensors or uses the natural properties of the material to communicate some information to people about themselves or their environment,” she said.

Davis was recently named a winner of the Architecture League of New York’s Emerging Voices 2022 competition and she was awarded a Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation Research Prize as the principal investigator for “MycoKnit,” an interdisciplinary, collaborative project that explores mycelium-based and knitted textiles to form a sustainable building material.

She has been featured in the PBS “Women in Science Profiles” series and work was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America” exhibition in 2021. That experience led to Davis cofounding the Black Reconstruction Collective, a nonprofit organization of Black architects, scholars and artists that supports and funds design work about the Black diaspora.

The principal of Felecia Davis Studio, Davis is currently penning book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives titled “Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles.”

Learn more about this year’s class of National Design Award winners on the Cooper Hewitt website.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Penn State is hosting a virtual symposium Sept. 23-24 that will explore how architects and designers in related disciplines can gain a better understanding of the impact the built environment has on shaping society’s inequalities, how the decisions they make as design professionals have consequences, and how they can help bring about better social equity in an increasingly polarizing world.

With a theme of “Design Consequences: Taking responsibility for our ideas,” this Stuckeman Research Symposium is being organized by Alexandra Staub, professor of architecture and an affiliate member of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.

Staub received a Racial Justice, Anti-Discrimination and Democratic Practices Grant from the College of Arts and Architecture for the event. Additional funding has been provided by the Harold K. Schilling Memorial Lecture on Science, Technology, and Society endowment of the Rock Ethics Institute; Stuckeman School; Department of Architecture; Stuckeman Center for Design Computing; and the Hamer Center for Community Design.

The symposium is being held in conjunction with the Stuckeman Research Open House, which will highlight the work that has been done within the school’s research centers and units over the past academic year.

“Starting with their formal education, architects and designers in related disciplines are trained to seek solutions to problems that are largely defined through the values and demands of their clients. The needs of additional stakeholders – especially members of marginalized communities – are typically not considered during the design process,” explains Staub. “Because our built environment is a powerful reflection of our culture while also shaping how we live, we need to address how we design and build if we wish to create environments that serve all members of a community, rather than simply those whose financial means put them at an advantage.”

Staub concluded by adding: “Designers are powerful thinkers. We need to tap into that potential to help promote social equity.”

The event, which is being produced and recorded by WPSU, will feature a series of lectures in which speakers will discuss their work and thinking on topics of social equity. This will be followed by roundtable discussions in which the speakers address methods that can bring social equity thinking into the classroom as well as professional practice of design.

Symposium speakers include:

  • Antwi Akom, professor and founding director of the Social Innovation and Urban Opportunity Lab — a joint research lab between the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco State University that focuses on combining culturally- and community-responsive design with new digital technologies in order to increase racial and spatial justice and improve health equity.
  • Catherine D’Ignazio, assistant professor of urban science and planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
  • Rayne Laborde, associate director of cityLAB UCLA, a design research center concentrated on urban spatial justice.
  • Andrea M. Matwyshyn, associate dean for innovation and technology, professor of law and engineering policy, and founding director of the PILOT Lab, a policy think-tank at Penn State.
  • Lily Song, assistant professor of race and social justice in the built environment at Northeastern University, whose work focuses on infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of frontline communities.
  • Ife Salema Vanable, founder and leader of i/van/able, a Bronx-based architectural workshop and think tank, visiting professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, visiting scholar at the Yale School of Architecture and doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is not required. To learn more, and for the link to join the symposium, visit the symposium website.

Pennsylvania State University

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Penn State architecture students and faculty contribute to Pan-African exhibition in France

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State faculty members DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design, and Yasmine Abbas, assistant teaching professor of architecture and engineering design, have designed an architectural space within the “UFA – Université des Futurs Africains [University of African Futures]” exhibition at the Le Lieu Unique, a national center for contemporary culture in Nantes, France.

The exhibition, which opened on April 9 and runs through Aug. 29, is part of a year-long “Africa 2020” event that was launched as a laboratory for production and the spread of knowledge and ideas generated out of African cultural heritage and knowledge systems. At the opening of the Africa 2020 season, which was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, French President Emmanuel Macron noted that both its “multidisciplinary nature – visual arts, performing arts, cinema, literature, science, technology, entrepreneurship, gastronomy, fashion, design, architecture” and its inclusion of 54 African countries make the Africa 2020 event “unprecedented.”

Curated by Oulimata Gueye, the UFA exhibition explores 21st-century relationships between technology, science, ecology, care, and the emancipatory potential of pan-African paradigms of computational knowledge. The projects on display engage the continued relevance in art and design of the term “HistoFuturist,” which is defined by African American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler as “someone who looks forward without turning his or her back on the past, combining an interest in the human factor and in technology.” The work also reflects the concept of “active utopia,” a term advanced by Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, whereby African actors create their “own metaphors of the future” based on indigenous models.

Osseo-Asare and Abbas’ featured work is the latest evolution of their open-source ”Fufuzela” design research, experimental adaptive bamboo structures engineered to function at the intersection of architecture and furniture while integrating biology with environmental design and engineering. These kit building systems leverage a novel, bamboo-composite, steel joint mechanism to enable low-cost construction of dynamic modular spaces that allow for a hybrid or “blended” experience of physical and digital realities. At Le Lieu Unique, the designed space is titled “Fufuzela­ – Lieu Utile,” which translates as “the useful space,” and serves as a central makerspace-type installation within the exhibition that can be used as a gathering place for research, meetings, collaborative work, and performances.

The research has been supported by the Museum of Modern Art, Penn State Materials Research Institute’s Covestro “Materials Matter at the Human Level” humanitarian materials initiative, and the Collaborative Design Research Center in the Stuckeman School. Central to the project is the approach of Osseo-Asare and Abbas to connect Penn State researchers in the Humanitarian Materials Lab (HuMatLab) and the Spatial Æffect Lab jointly with high-end fabricators in the United States and Europe, as well as grassroots artisanal makers and engineering technicians in Ghana and West Africa, to work on materials-driven, collaborative design research.

A dozen Penn State graduate and undergraduate students from both the Stuckeman School and the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs (SEDTAPP), have participated in the Fufuzela collaborative design research project, including Lizz Andrzejewski, Paniz Farrokhsiar, Sam Rubenstein, Nicholas Fudali, Bryan Ray and Danielle Vickers. In addition, the work of current master of science in architecture students Tiffanie Leung and Mahan Motalebi in the past year garnered them credit in the UFA exhibition.

Leung, who worked with Osseo-Asare to study the “bone” morphology and joint mechanics and maintained the open-source repository throughout the co-creation process, reflects that “ … one can see how the Fufuzela can begin to emerge as an organism capable of development and revision beyond the lab.”

Motalebi, who assisted Abbas with computing the threaded “skin” of the structure, said, “One thing that I like about [the] Fufuzela is the way it gathers people from … different parts of the world with people working on it from different locations … I see [the] Fufuzela as an object and a structure that provides the space for more human entanglement, and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of that.”

Since France was under lockdown due to a COVID-19 surge in early spring, Osseo-Asare and Abbas could not install the exhibit themselves; however, students from Ecole des Beaux-arts de Nantes St. Nazaire have worked with the pair remotely to make their design come to fruition.

According to Osseo-Asare, both the Stuckeman School Shop and the Digital Fabrication Lab were “invaluable resources to support building physical mockups and using computer-controlled rapid prototyping equipment to iteratively test design components.” The Fufuzela design research project is part of the Material Matters (MM) research cluster in the Department of Architecture.

In parallel to the exhibition in France, several additional modules of the Fufuzela have been constructed in Ghana by members of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) Makers Collective in collaboration with a local partner, the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge. The modules are slated to travel to eight regions in Ghana for codesign, knowledge exchange, and curation workshops conducted as the third cycle of ANO‘s Mobile Museum project that Osseo-Asare collaborated to pilot in 2015.

Founded by renowned writer, filmmaker, historian, and cultural theorist Nana Oforiatta Ayim, ANO is currently leading a complete re-establishment of Ghana’s museum sector on behalf of the Government of Ghana. In January 2021, Osseo-Asare authored a chapter titled “Architecture” for the Ghana Museums Report, as part of the President’s Committee on Museums and Monuments, titled “Fufuzela: Futuring the Pan-African Museum.”

The AMP, founded by Osseo-Asare and Abbas, is a transnational project that helps bolster maker ecosystems in Africa by encouraging grassroots makers, students, and young professionals to collaborate to reutilize recycled materials. The project has garnered numerous awards, most recently winning the Smart Cities Urban Innovation Award for Citizen Engagement in the Le Monde 2020 World Urban Innovation Challenge. The project won the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Challenge 2013, a 2017 SEED Award for Public Interest Design from Design Corps, and a Design Award Commendation, Social Impact, from the American Institute of Architects-Austin 2020 Design Awards.

Osseo-Asare is a co-founding principal of Low Design Office, an architecture and integrative design studio based in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana, that explores the links between sustainability, technology, and geopolitics. The firm was recently named a winner of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices 21 competition.

At Penn State, Osseo-Asare directs the HuMatLab, which triangulates the Stuckeman School, SEDTAPP in the College of Engineering and the Materials Research Institute. The lab serves as a key driver of the University’s Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design with Africa (AESEDA), a cross-university initiative to leverage teaching, research, and service to better the lives of those living in Africa and the diaspora. Osseo-Asare’s research spans design innovation, open-source urbanism, digital fabrication, and architecture robots.

Abbas, who is also affiliated with the College of Arts and Architecture’s Center for Pedagogy in Art and Design (C-PAD), researches the computational design of ambiances and the making of environments for living across contemporary conditions of expanded physical, digital and mental mobilities. The Spatial Æffect Lab, which she founded, advances atmospheres design as a general approach to parametric placemaking. The two modules of Fufuzela on display as part of the UFA exhibition investigate the optical effects of structural color in threaded spatial envelopes.

Pennsylvania State University

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Architecture Professor to be Featured in Upcoming MoMA exhibition

UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State who has gained widespread recognition for her work designing lightweight textiles that change properties in response to their environment, is one of 10 architects, designers and artists who will be featured in an upcoming Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition that examines contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States.

“Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” which has been described by organizers as “an investigation into the intersections of architecture, blackness and anti-black racism in the American context,” will run Feb. 20 through the end of May. Its original opening date in October was postponed due to the coronavirus.

The exhibition features a series of 10 newly commissioned works that, according to MoMA will “explore how people have mobilized black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance and refusal.” It is the fourth iteration of the museum’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series, which was launched in 2010.

Davis, who is the Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, is developing textile systems for use in architecture that can sense and respond to the world around them through digital electronic programing and sensors. These systems can also be programmed by using the natural transformative quality of the material itself in connection with environmental cues, such as humidity, temperature and light.

The purpose of the textile systems – or “architextiles,” as they are referred to – is to use the responsiveness and sensual qualities of the material to communicate information or, in other words, to tell a story. An example of these systems are soft walls that elicit emotions from people in a space or to help a person who is not in touch with their emotions be able to communicate to a caretaker, doctor or nurse in a nonverbal way.

The 10 artists, designers and architects featured by MoMA – Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Amanda Williams, along with Davis – have been giving virtual lectures together at universities and institutions around the nation on issues surrounding racial injustice and Black history since the fall. “The Black Reconstruction Collective,” as the group is known, will be hosted by the Department of Architecture in partnership with Stuckeman School and WPSU at 6 p.m. on March 24 as part of the school’s Spring Virtual Lecture Series.

More information about the show can be found on the MoMA website.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Stuckeman Center for Design Computing (SCDC) is collaborating with the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs at Penn State to bring its annual Flash Symposium and Open House to the virtual environment on Sept. 25. The theme of the 2020 online event is “Design Thinking.”

“This symposium explores how, as designers, we design thinking,” said Yasmine Abbas, assistant teaching professor in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture and the lead organizer of the event. “How do we design holistic approaches to curating and optimizing the spaces, scenarios and systems within which we design – so as to fully and beneficially leverage the feedback loops between our environmental (and social and psychological, etc.) contexts and our thinking (processes and outcomes)?”

“Making the program virtual is particularly meaningful at the present moment,” added DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design, and symposium co-organizer. “Especially during a time of COVID-19 – when many of us are socially distanced from not only each other, but also our research labs, libraries, classrooms and workshops/fabrication labs; and when systemic issues of racial and social justice and equity are resurfacing once again in the United States.

“It is critical for us, as a society, to discover how better understanding of these relationships can inform redesign of our world to be more just, more sustainable, more healthful and more inclusive into the future.”

Speakers for the virtual event, which will run from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., include:

  • Winifred Elysse Newman, acting associate dean for research and graduate studies and Homer Curtis Mickel and Leona Carter Mickel Endowed Chair in the School of Architecture at Clemson University, and director of the Institute for Intelligent Materials, Systems and Environments. In her talk, titled “What does digital have to do with it?” she will speak about the expanding digital world and how the relationship between designers and digital tools fosters computational design thinking.
  • Dan Lockton, assistant professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Imaginaries Lab. “New Ways to Think, New Ways to Live: Imaginaries, Design, and Futures” will explore idea of imaginaries — the mental images and understandings people have of big concepts from the climate to their own health — and how designers can work with these, to uncover them, help people share them and help people reimagine how life could be.
  • Aradhana Goel leads research and design strategy for Bayer Pharmaceutical’s cardiovascular therapeutics platform as part of the Digital Ventures team. She will speak on “Design Thinking in Service of Behavior Change,” or how design and data together can help create sustainable behavior change and help reframe people’s perspectives.
  • Katja Hölttä-Otto, associate professor of product development in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Aalto University. Her talk will touch on the role of empathy in design for well-being and discuss evidence-based decision-making in multidisciplinary design processes.
  • Darla Lindberg, professor of architecture at Penn State, will also present the findings of her book “Outside the Skin: Systems Approaches to Society’s Larger Structural Issues.” Published in January 2019 by Applied Research & Design, the book takes design thinking outside the skin (of buildings and people) to present an emergent architecture of collective choice and consequence.

“We are fortunate to have a some of the leading engineering design researchers right here at Penn State. This event will help strengthen our students’ and faculty ties with international design leaders and help us continue to broader our notions of design and its impact in the world.,” said Scarlett Miller, associate professor of engineering design and industrial engineering, and director of both the Brite Lab and the Engineering Design program in SEDTAPP. Miller also contributed to organizing the symposium.

In addition to the speakers, SCDC faculty and student researchers will share the projects they have been working on for the past year via an online platform that translates the physical layout of the SCDC and SEDTAPP facilities into in a virtual interactive space.

“Typically, our researchers have their posters on display in our lab within the Stuckeman Family Building during the Open House and they discuss their projects with symposium participants who tour our space,” explained José Pinto Duarte, director of the SCDC and the Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation. “This year, due to concerns surrounding the spread of the coronavirus, our researchers will present their posters online, which actually allows people from around the world to see the important work we are doing, not just those who are on campus.”

The SCDC is devoted to advancing design research and learning in computational design. The center’s research includes engaging in architectural robotics, simulation and visualization, game development, geographic information systems, sustainable development and digital fabrication, as well as historical and theoretical aspects of computation in design.

Registration for the 2020 Flash Symposium, which is free and open to the public, is required via https://bit.ly/Flash_20. For more information, including the full schedule of events, visit the event website.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Özgüç Çapunaman, a doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture, has been recognized for his research by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) as the recipient of the Young CAADRIA Award. His research centers on interactive digital fabrication, programmable composites, computational making and architectural tool development.

Prior to attending Penn State, Çapunaman earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design with high honors from Istanbul Bilgi University and a master’s degree in computation design from Carnegie Mellon University. His master’s thesis was titled “CAM as a Tool for Creative Expression: Informing Digital Fabrication through Human Interaction” explores human agency in digital design-fabrication workflows.”

Selection of the Young CAADRIA Award recipient is based on the merit of a full research paper, research contribution and relevance to CAADRIA with demonstrated depth of research interest by a committee consisting of people from CAADRIA, the Paper Selection Committee and the conference host. According to Çapunaman, many important individuals in the field of computational design have been given the award in the past years, which made it a desirable goal for him to reach.

“Interactive digital fabrication within the design computing field is an up-and-coming area of interest for researchers,” he said. “Being awarded the Young CAADRIA Award hopefully means more attention can be brought towards this subject. Personally, being recognized in this way is very encouraging as I begin my Ph.D. efforts here at Penn State.”

Çapunaman’s paper submission focuses on interactive digital fabrication workflow. His research, which he began to establish during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to question the human relationship with digital fabrication tools that are used in the field, such as CAM and CAD.

“The paper presents an interactive and adaptive design-fabrication workflow where the user can actively take turns in the fabrication process,” Çapunaman wrote in his abstract. “The proposed experimental setup utilizes paste extrusion additive manufacturing in tandem with real-time control of an industrial robotic arm. By incorporating a computer-vision based feedback loop, it captures momentary changes in the fabricated artifact introduced by the users to inform the digital representation.”

According to Çapunaman, the tools that designers may currently use are important in pinpointing the design space they navigate. He believes that these tools are not being questioned enough and that digital practitioners should be paying more attention to the means of expression with which they work.

Benay Gürsoy Toykoç, assistant professor of architecture at Penn State who is also a previous Young CAADRIA Award recipient herself, encouraged Çapunaman to apply for the honor. Gürsoy Toykoç was one of Çapunaman’s instructors during his undergraduate studies at Istanbul Bilgi University and she currently leads the Form and Matter — or ForMat — Lab  in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing where the graduate student is a researcher. According to her, the paper Çapunaman submitted presented an original challenging approach to robotic fabrication in design fields.

“Without any hesitation, I can say Özgüç was one of the best undergraduate students I’ve ever had the chance to work with; he’s always pushed the boundaries,” she said. “As a Ph.D. student, he is again very ambitious, self-sufficient and eager to learn and explore. He likes challenges and does not feel comfortable in his comfort zone.”

Gürsoy Toykoç explained that from the very first class she taught with Çapunaman as a student, she could tell that he would be particularly successful. She always enjoyed their intellectual conversations, which she felt always kept her perspective on things fresh.

“What makes Özgüç stand out [as a student and researcher] is his directness, openness and critical approach to solving problems. He thinks outside the box,” she said. “He communicates himself very well in both written and spoken conversation and I think one of the reasons he was given this award is his ability to clearly communicate complex ideas.”

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Stuckeman School architecture alumna Stella Murray was recently named a recipient of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship which supports architecture students who wish to enter the architectural lighting design profession.

A Schreyer Honors College scholar with interdisciplinary honors in architecture and architectural engineering, Murray graduated with her research-based master’s degree in architecture in May while simultaneously earning undergraduate degrees in architecture (B.Arch.) and Italian.

According to John Roake, chairman of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund (JSSF) Board of Trustees, “Both [recipients] made outstanding submissions which concisely and clearly expressed their phenomenal passion and drive to use light as a major part of their ongoing studies, as well as their intended future careers.”

“It is difficult to fully express in words my gratitude for having been selected as a recipient of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund,” said Murray. “The scholarship grants me a host of opportunities; however, it is the acknowledgement of my potential as a lighting designer that means the most to me.”

The Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund is a UK-registered charity that has been set up at the behest of the late Jonathan Speirs to allow “a student of architecture to investigate the study of architectural lighting design.”

Speirs was recognized as one of the world’s leading architectural lighting designers up until his death in 2012 at age 54 due to cancer.

Murray was one of two recipients of the 2019-20 Speirs scholarship.

In addition to the Speirs award, Murray earned a 2020 Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award from Penn State for her thesis titled “Bringing to Light the Qur’an: The Theophany of Allah By Means of Lighting Design in the Süleymaniye Mosque.”

She was also recently named the recipient of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) King Student Medal for Excellence in Architectural and Environmental Design Research. The award acknowledges students for their innovation, integrity and scholarship in architectural and/or environmental design research.

Murray has been working virtually as an intern with Horton Lees Brogden (HLB) Lighting Design this summer. HLB leadership has been so impressed with her work and passion that she was offered a full-time position at the firm as a design assistant. She will transition into her new role at HLB in October.

Murray is also currently studying for the WELL Accredited Professional (AP) exam, which she plans to take in September. Being a WELL AP “denotes expertise in the WELL Building Standard and a commitment to advancing human health and wellness in buildings and communities around the world.”

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), which was founded by Penn State Stuckeman School faculty members DK Osseo-Asare and Yasmine Abbas, has been awarded the Smart Cities Urban Innovation Award for Citizen Engagement in the Le Monde 2020 Global Urban Innovation Challenge.

The annual Le Monde competition promotes the best urban transformation projects worldwide and awards those that: stand out for their originality, efficiency and impact; address the area’s major challenges, such as global warming, social and gender inequalities, democratic governance, etc.; contribute to improving city services and quality of life; and draw upon citizen involvement. The 2020 competition drew 61 entries representing five continents — down from the average of 200, which can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Entrants are vying for the overall Grand Prix (Grand Prize) and the top prize in each of five categories: mobility, energy, habitat, urban planning and civic engagement.

An international selection committee comprised of experts in urban change submitted its top choices to the jury, comprised of journalists from Le Monde, who named the awardees.

The civic engagement award, in particular, celebrates “a democratic, horizontal process, whereby citizens play a role in developing and managing physical and virtual urban spaces and services.”

Launched in 2012 by Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design who also leads the Humanitarian Materials Lab at Penn State, and Abbas, assistant teaching professor of architecture, the AMP is a transnational project that helps bolster maker ecosystems in Africa by teaching students and young professionals how to reuse recycled materials.

The project, which is in Ghana, has received numerous accolades, winning the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge and Design Corps’ 2017 SEED Award for Public Interest Design. The AMP was also exhibited at the 2017 Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism.

Osseo-Asare is a cofounding principal of Low Design Office (LOWDO), an architecture and integrative design studio based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana that explores the links between sustainability, technology and geopolitics. LOWDO was a finalist for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program in 2019 and was named to Domus magazine’s 50 Best Architecture Firms in 2020 list.

Le Monde is a French daily newspaper with a circulation exceeding 323,039 copies per issue in 2009. It is considered one of France’s three newspapers of record.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Julio Diarte, an architecture doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School who is focusing his research on repurposing waste materials for low-cost housing, has been named a 2020 Engineering for Change (E4C) Research Fellow.

The E4C Research Fellowship Program is extremely competitive; more than 420 applications from 72 countries were whittled down to the 2020 cohort of 25 researchers. The program is designed to prepare professionals to solve local and global challenges and create knowledge as a public good. Fellows support the development of research collaborations defined together with E4C’s local and global partners.

A native of Asunción, Paraguay, Diarte said the fellowship program stood out to him because of its ability to run remotely while allowing him to continue his work, which focuses on developing technologies for upcycling waste cardboard as construction materials for low-cost housing.

As a researcher, Diarte believes it is essential to facilitate conversations with people around the world to promote diversity and to communicate the importance of his work. He is also fascinated by research that can be accomplished in collaboration with international institutions that are working on real-world problems in underserved communities.

“I thought this fellowship could be an excellent opportunity to connect with these institutions and learn what they do, how they work and potentially work with them in the future,” he said. “I became interested in global development because we are living in an ‘all hands-on-deck’ environment where underserved communities worldwide demand the collaboration of architects and designers to improve their environment.”

As an E4C Fellow in the Habitat sector, Diarte is part of a multidisciplinary research team that collaborates with Penn State. The research investigates affordable housing and disaster risk reduction in East African countries.

“In addition to the research collaboration between E4C and Penn State, I will be researching technologies that will be incorporated in the E4C Solutions Library,” Diarte said. “The library is a living database of innovative products and services for those living in resource-constrained environments. The library includes technologies in agriculture, energy, habitat, health, informational and communications technology, sanitation, transportation, and water.”

Diarte is excited about the opportunities that will open up after he completes the fellowship because of the team he will be working on, which includes researchers from many countries working in different areas. He believes the fellowship will strengthen his professional development in the sector and the networking opportunities could help him establish future research collaborations or projects.

“This fellowship is an opportunity to be part of a unique worldwide network of professionals working on global development,” Diarte said. “I believe the experience will strengthen my expertise as an architecture researcher interested in contributing to projects for underserved communities worldwide.

E4C is a non-profit organization made up of engineers, technologists, designers, social entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations and community advocates who are committed to improving the quality of life in communities around the world by facilitating the development of affordable, local appropriate and sustainable solutions to the most pressing social challenges.

More about the fellowship program can be found at https://www.engineeringforchange.org/e4c-fellowship/.

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