A Place for Plastics
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Alice Potts
Alice Potts is a biotech fashion and accessories designer and material researcher based in London. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2018, Potts went on to undertake a residency at the Onassis Foundation in Athens. At the forefront of biotech fashion, her practice focuses on sustainability and the engineering of new biomaterial, developing ways to integrate biodegradable materials in garment design. Potts has contributed to titles including Vogue Germany , i-D, Dazed and WIRED.
Megan Valanidas
Megan is a multi-disciplinary industrial designer and researcher focused on complex systems and biodesign initiatives. Megan was trained in Studio Arts with a focus on wood, metal and plastics fabrication as well as French linguistics at the University of Arizona. She earned her Master of Industrial Design (MID) from the Rhode Island School of Design.Valanidas has been a sustainable futures instructor at RISD and James Madison University where she has taught industrial design with a focus on research and speculative investigations. She also worked with teens as a Design Fellow for the NuVu Innovation School. Valanidas was a featured speaker and exhibitor for Biodesign: From Inspiration to Integration. She has presented internationally on the topic of bioplastics and the environment. In addition, Valanidas has been a science educator, focusing on sustainable farming in extreme environments.
Paige Tomfohrde
Paige Tomfohrde (she/her) is a graduate student researcher and DOVE Fellow at the University of Minnesota. She is a diasporic settler of color living on the ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. She is pursuing an M.A. in Apparel Studies- Dress, History, and Culture. Her research interests include Environmental Justice, Intersectionality, and Sustainability. She received undergraduate degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology (A.A.S. Fashion Design) and Purdue University (B.S. Apparel Design and Technology). She has over seven years of design industry experience focused in textiles and trend research. After completing her Master’s degree and PhD., Paige intends to become a professor focused on using decolonizing and intersectional pedagogies to incorporate a social justice lens to fashion education.
Common Ground
Lola Ben-Alon
Lola Ben-Alon is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Building Science and Technology curriculum. She specializes in socially and environmentally sustainable building practices, natural building materials, and engineering-architecture collaborations.Her current work focuses on quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the embodied and operational impacts of low-carbon building materials and methods such as rammed earth. She is particularly passionate about fostering connections between academia and local communities by using participatory design and social hands-on engagement in the production of the built environment. Through sharing skills and knowledge that promote healthy and affordable living environments, Ben-Alon hopes to diversify the building industry and catalyze new intersections and creative dialogues among the various disciplines of architecture, engineering, art, and sociology. Her work was published in Building and Environment, Journal of Green Building, Woodhead Publishing Series in Civil and Structural Engineering, and Automation in Construction.
Meg Lundquist
Meg Lundquist holds a degree in Environmental Studies from the College of St. Benedict and an M.Arch degree from the University of Minnesota. Her work creates connections between academia, practice, and ecology. She teaches to build collaboration among peers and form meaningful relationships in the built environment
Earthen
Tectonics
Adam Marcus
Adam Marcus directs Variable Projects, a design and research studio that operates at the intersection of architecture, computation, and fabrication. He is also a partner in Futures North, a public art collaborative dedicated to exploring the aesthetics of data. His work explores ways in which new technologies can interface with longstanding architectural traditions of craft, materiality, ornament, and pattern. Prior to founding his own practice, he worked at Marble Fairbanks in New York City as project architect for a number of award-winning educational and public projects.Projects include Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab, a prototype for a floating breakwater produced with collaborators at CCA's Architectural Ecologies Lab, which recently won an Innovation Award from the American Institute of Architects and a R+D Award from Architect magazine. Other work includes Centennial Chromagraph, a computationally-designed architectural installation which received a 2015 Small Project Award from the national chapter of AIA, and Meander, a permanent public artwork commissioned for CHS Field, a new baseball park in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Jessica Rossi-Mastracci
Jessica is an Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota. Her research work investigates new ways of adapting to future unknown water conditions in extreme landscapes, with a focus on infrastructure, materiality, and ephemerality. Recent research in Las Vegas, Nevada, tracks invisible stormwater infrastructure and its impact on urbanism, ecological emergence, mobility, and socio-hydrologic systems. Other research work catalogs land-based water infrastructure in arid climates, exploring indigenous, historic, and low-tech infrastructural methodologies and construction methods as ways of mitigating flooding, harvesting water, and encouraging vegetation. She is interested in experimental representation techniques, integrating digital technology, hybrid drawing, and modeling to explore landscape change and processes.
Illuminated Shadows
Roger Cummings
Roger Cummings activates relationships between space and place through art, design, independent livelihood, and collective social enterprise. Cummings’ work acknowledges, while at the same time, progresses the direction of urban visual expression. He aims to create works of art in public and private spaces that have personal and impersonal uses, in the hopes of enlivening meaningful, human interactions.Urban architecture, design, and planning inform his work. In close examination of these influences, his work has taken the form of large-scale sculptures, pocket parks, and functional enhancements to public space. The functionality of Cummings’ work aims to incite in urban citizens’ a lens through which they are able to see themselves included, represented, and civically engaged in establishing the visual identities of their neighborhood. In placing his work at the center of a critical dialogue, where art becomes a vehicle through which cooperative models of community engagement encourage social interactions in public space, his choice of materials has evolved. He has explored new ways of mixing an accessible medium like aerosol paint with steel, stone, recyclable found objects, and photo voltaic. He has also experimented with using tiles and fabric to extrude and create three-dimensional multi-media biomorphic structures that reference Hip Hop, urban design, and sustainability.
Javkhlan Nyamjav [java]
Java is interested in combining design, research, and innovation to discover innovative solutions to environmental and social equality concerns. Her design approach is based on systems thinking, which involves looking at things as parts of a larger whole and looking for connections between them. Java is a recent Master of Architecture graduate of the University of Minnesota. Her Master's thesis focused on providing more resources to Mongolian nomadic farmers and revitalizing land degradation caused by key economic drivers such as mining and cashmere production. The project integrates technology advances that have the potential to accelerate growth in developing countries.
She worked as a researcher at the Minnesota Design Center, where she focused on future streets with auto vehicles and post-pandemic design solutions. Java has also worked with MSR Design, exploring the impact of embodied carbon and strategies to include it during early design phases. She is now completing her MSRP degree at the University of Minnesota, where she is studying interactive installations to encourage pro-environmental behavior, as well as the spatial and material effects of a pandemic.
She worked as a researcher at the Minnesota Design Center, where she focused on future streets with auto vehicles and post-pandemic design solutions. Java has also worked with MSR Design, exploring the impact of embodied carbon and strategies to include it during early design phases. She is now completing her MSRP degree at the University of Minnesota, where she is studying interactive installations to encourage pro-environmental behavior, as well as the spatial and material effects of a pandemic.
unprecedented
Blair is the current chair of the University of British Columbia architecture program. He teaches design studios in both the Architecture and Environmental Design programs and coordinates and teaches design media courses at SALA. Blair currently leads a large UBC Teaching Learning Enhancement Fund Grant (TLEF) to increase opportunities for hands-on building, fabrication, making, and prototyping for students in all SALA programs. Blair was awarded the Killam Teaching Prize in 2019. He is also the director of HiLo Lab; a UBC SALA based collaborative research initiative that reckons with three interrelated ideas – the use of second stream materials in construction, providing designers and the community with greater access to digital design and fabrication processes, and the design and application of energy and material efficient methods for construction. Specifically, the HiLo Lab team is driven to generate sophisticated but universally accessible tool sets and strategies for efficiently and sustainably building using low-impact materials and techniques. The lab is a model for active learning, where student researchers engage design problems directly and work through challenges in an applied manner. The HiLo Lab was awarded the 2020 R&D Award from Architect magazine for Zippered Wood. HiLo's work has been included in ACSA and ACADIA conferences, and was recently featured in Fabricate 2020, a triennial publication of cutting-edge built projects from both academia and practice (UCL Press).
Adam Rysanek
Dr. Adam Rysanek is Assistant Professor of Environmental Systems at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA). He is an expert in green building design, construction and operation, with over 10 years of experience engaging with high-performance building projects in Canada, Europe, and Asia. At SALA, Dr. Rysanek's research specialisations include the study of parametric tools (I.e., Rhino/Grasshopper) for performative building design, the application of emerging technologies for design optimisation and performance evaluation (particularly augmented reality and machine learning), the evaluation of building performance using Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors and data analytics, and the study of future trends in community-scale energy systems - such as building-integrated transportation energy systems (BITES). Dr. Rysanek holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and a BASc and MScE from Queen’s University. Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Rysanek led research out of the ETH Zurich Institute of Technology in Architecture, the ETH Zurich Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, and the Energy Efficient Cities Initiative at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Rysanek supervises full-time post-doctoral researchers and graduate research students out of UBC SALA and the UBC Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Malini Srivastava, AIA, DDes, is a licensed architect in the state of Minnesota, Assistant Professor in Resilient and Regenerative Design, and Director of the Masters of Science in Research Practices program in the College of Design. Malini currently serves as President-Elect of AIA Minneapolis.She completed her doctoral defense at Carnegie Mellon University (2020), titled, Purposeful Play. She is a 2018 recipient of the American Institute of Architects’ Young Architect Award and a 2014 recipient of the Archibald and Edyth Bush Fellowship. In 2017, Malini received the Outstanding Educator Award from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at NDSU.
Alanna is an arts administrator and project manager with experience in a range of creative fields, including craft, design, and fine arts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Grinnell College and a Master of Arts in liberal studies from the State University of New York. Her graduate research focused on gender and supernatural belief in late medieval and early modern England. Alanna joined the College of Design in 2021 as coordinator for the Kusske Design Initiative.
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