Welcome to the Research Open House At Pratt, we define research broadly and inclusively. When interdisciplinarity and innovation are second nature to the groundbreaking work done by our community, it’s hard not to push the boundary (and definition) of what is possible.
We’re disrupting what research can be.
At Pratt, we define research broadly and inclusively. When interdisciplinarity and innovation are second nature to the groundbreaking work done by our community, it’s hard not to push the boundary (and definition) of what is possible.
The Research Open House is hosted by the Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships to celebrate, elevate, and cultivate the work of our faculty, staff, and students. Each year, all members of the Pratt community are invited to submit their work for consideration, and year after year, we see the breadth and depth of research being done at the Institute. This year we’ve seen projects that range from design solutions that consider underserved populations or spotlight concerns for the environment to analyses on community-building, wellbeing, and teaching that reflect our ever-changing world. And of course, projects that bring the fringe to the forefront.
The Research Open House has remained online for its third spring due to pandemic challenges. However, we look forward to in-person events at our dedicated research facility, The Research Yard, scheduled to be complete in fall 2022. This new 40,000-square-foot cutting-edge facility will be located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and will continue our legacy of creation and disruption in research and engaged practice. We can’t wait to host our researchers and research-enthusiasts there soon.
The mission of the Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships is to uncover, communicate, and foster the creative future with Pratt faculty, staff, and students who can support research scholarship, community activism, and academic leadership.
The Research Open House is only one of our many facets. So if you are interested in getting in touch with us or have any questions, please reach out to research-partnership@pratt.edu.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Congratulations to this year’s award winners. We celebrate you, your accomplishments, and the future of your achievements.
Sustainability Award
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
the potential key to unanswered questions about the source of life on Earth and the necessity of its protection. Jennifer Telesca’s research hopes to educate the public about these fascinating vents, while working with advocates in real time for their protection.
Innovation Award
School of Art
This project seeks to analyze and explore potential futures, as NFT’s have disrupted the capitalist model of art and art making. By positioning themselves as analysts while students in arts and cultural management, these young researchers bring fresh perspective to this ever-shifting landscape.
This year, we have two ties for the categories of Impact and Start-Up
Impact Award
School of Architecture
Students designed a functional and beautiful inflatable structure to not only bring awareness to single-use plastic, but also serve as a collection hub for plastic bags. Drop offs are currently the only way to recycle plastic film in New York State, so the structure becomes not only a collection point, but an educational touchpoint on permanent drop-off locations in the community.
Impact Award
School of Information
One of the many impacts of the pandemic was the necessary shift to virtual and online engagement for museum and cultural heritage institutions. While in-person engagement may have returned, these organizations require guidance to improve the experiences of attendees to make sure they are meaningful, engaging, and accessible. The Center for Digital Experiences has worked with select organizations and is building a “playbook” to support this effort.
Both of these selections use design to create a more accessible, inclusive world.
Start-Up Power Award
School of Design
Graphia is a graphic tablet-based tool that helps children write in a creative visual way, while capable of diagnosing learning disabilities with an AI model. Hoping to end the cycle of academic underachievement due to underdiagnosis and inaccessibility to tests, the Graphia is an incredible support tool for both students and teachers.
Start-Up Power Award
School of Design
This biomimicry project assists individuals with less mobility and strength in one hand while they cook. The cutting board and relevant attachments are solutions that facilitate independence and empower its users in the kitchen.
People’s Choice Award
School of Architecture
More than two thousand people voted and this year’s winner is Kalye Toolkit: Streets for the Community, By the Community. We’re thrilled that this resource—which empowers community members to envision the future of their community with technology—was the clear favorite of the public.
Congratulations again to all of our winners!
I am delighted to announce the recipients of this year’s Research Recognition Award: Scott Ruff and Jeffrey Hogrefe. Professors Ruff and Hogrefe are being honored for their publication In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism (Lars Müller 2020), a transdisciplinary anthology of essays edited with Carrie Eastman and Ashley Simone.
The Research Recognition Award, one of Pratt’s highest honors, is conferred annually by the Academic Senate and the Office of the Provost. This year’s award—the first of its kind to be awarded to a collaborative team—is a testament to the excellence of Professors Ruff and Hogrefe’s work. As Hogrefe summarizes, “essays from contemporary architects, historians, and artists” are brought together in this anthology that concentrates on “the spaces of refuge and delight that have been appropriated in the afterlife of slavery. . ..” Ruff further observes that the “new forms of knowledge” acknowledged in—and generated by—this anthology contribute to the “redress of racism through the register of acts that may be characterized by sublime beauty and love.”
Please join me in congratulating Professors Hogrefe and Ruff on their vitally important work and for sharing their research at Pratt and beyond.
Sincerely,
Donna Heiland
Provost
Pratt Institute
The Office of Research & Strategic Partnerships thanks Professors Hogrefe and Ruff for sharing a brief presentation of their work and answering our questions on their research and careers.
Q+A WITH PROFESSORS RUFF AND HOGREFE
How would you describe your research, especially as it pertains to working together?
We share a desire to challenge the potential for architectural form-making as a destructive factor in human life. It seems irresponsible to design architectural form without considering the context that the form is addressing, and that too often is still the case in schools of architecture and professional practice. As such, our research is based on feminist principles of sharing and collaboration as they can be applied to architecture.
Jeffrey’s work in architecture writing and Scott’s work in community development prepared us to work together. In guiding the editorial content for In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, we also worked closely with several of the contributors, notably Ann Holder and Marisa Williamson. Gathering in the afterlife of slavery, we read and discussed a range of texts and shared individual experience in an effort that was thoroughly collaborative. We held teach-ins in Jeffrey’s office at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. The discussions, talks, and exchanges that led to this volume took place outside of the official course curriculum, through labors of love that are characteristic of Black studies. It is not merely academic or intellectual respect, but also the transformative power of love that makes it possible to continue participating in a discourse in which one is the subject of a painful history. As Toni Morrison once wrote, “Something that is loved is never lost.”
What are you most proud of accomplishing as a research team?
We are most proud of having developed and co-taught Connecting to the Archive, an advanced undergraduate research studio that we introduced in spring 2021. The experience of introducing an approach to architecture that called upon the lived experience of students of color and watching them excitedly develop projects over the semester that they could proudly show their parents, and that they never thought they would be able to design, was one of the richest experiences. In working through the exchanges with the students, we were each compelled to reveal ourselves to students in a way that doesn’t normally take place in the classroom. We were not surprised when we received the dean’s pedagogy award in the student choice category. We have been able to work with four of those students as outside critics on their degree projects and have encouraged them to continue in graduate school and develop the ideas that they formed in the studio. Co-teaching the studio allowed us to bring together many ideas that we have been developing elsewhere about the role of representation in architecture and the mark on the ground.
Has your approach to research changed since working with each other?
Working together has shown us the value of collaborative research when there are clearly defined differences. Jeffrey approaches the work from the perspective of the humanities, which means that he brings an approach to the exchange that is written and discursive. Scott brings a grounding in architecture as a formal graphic presentation and he is also versed in the discourse of architecture and feminism that we both bring to the conversation. Collaborative research acquires a cumulative weight when the collaborators appreciate their individual abilities and strengths.
Given that your research is transdisciplinary in nature, have you had any challenges while engaging with multiple and intersecting lenses? If so, have any of these challenges led to revelations that surprised you?
Audre Lorde once wrote that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. While her observation referred to poetry, we feel that the same dictum could be applied to architecture. We have many discussions about the ways in which African American space can emerge in an architecture that is engaged in the processes and logics of the modernist idiom that we have inherited. And this, of course, applies to the codes and laws that govern the ways that architectural form is revealed today in the critical race exchange that started in law schools. The surprises come mostly from our students. We co-taught a Black Studies elective in fall 2021, Mapping Lines of Flight. In the course, students wrote personal essays that encouraged them to take apart and write themselves into maps. At the same time, they were encouraged to design new maps that merged the ground, air, and myth. The results were outstanding to Scott because he wasn’t used to reading student writing in the first person, which is uncommon in architecture, and to Jeffrey because he wasn’t used to seeing graphics as a form of personal reflection.
What would your advice be for researchers just starting their career?
Both of us were consummate researchers early in our educations—nerds who built projects and pursued our own interests. We would advise them to take risks and to dream. The imagination is a very powerful motivator. We believe that research begins in school and therefore all researchers are students and instructors. We attempt to encourage our students based on their strengths to pursue their own interests on the level of imagination in collaborative activism. Research requires forging into unfamiliar territories and can therefore meet other investigators along the path. Research is emotional work and requires a commitment to developing an emotional, inner life that can support the research.
Jeffrey Hogrefe
Jeffrey Hogrefe is a professor of humanities and media studies, the co-founder of the architecture writing program and In Search of African American and Indigenous Space Research Collective, and affiliate faculty in the graduate program in performance studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. As an Oglala Lakota Sun Dance person and a transdisciplinary scholar and creative practitioner, he works on a collective pedagogy in aesthetics and politics in emerging, discrete communities. Hogrefe is the co-editor of In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism (Lars Müller, 2020) and the co-creator of The Abolitionist Landscape Project, a cultural remapping of the Potomac River Valley in the US.
Scott Ruff
Scott Ruff is an adjunct professor of architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He has taught at Syracuse University, Tulane University, Yale University, and Cornell University, among others. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and he has received awards for diversity, inclusion, and community outreach from the American Institute of Architects and Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture. His articles include “Signifying: An African American Language to Landscape,” “Spatial ‘wRapping’: A Speculation on Men’s Hip-Hop Fashion,” and “Creative Practices in Afrosurrealism.” He is the co-editor of In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism (Lars Müller, 2020).
Jonathan A. Scelsa
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Aeroponic Aggregates is a meditation on the role of masonry construction within contemporary building culture by re-examining the volumetric nature of the brick for its capacity to sustain biological life.
Alexandra Barker; Sara Brandt, MArch ’22; Ivan Yan Man Hin, MArch ’22
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Taconic Fellowship
The team works with women and their children living at Concourse House in the Bronx, a transitional housing shelter. Together, they’re working to design outdoor environments for arts and learning, making better use of the available outdoor space.
Agrima Gupta, BArch ’22
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Can You Smell? is a speculative project forming a new media of communication through scent by utilizing gamification and a chance to translate intangible experiences into tangible spaces.
Maria Sieira
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Over thirty Galician architects talk about their work in informal conversations with a Pratt professor, a Galician emigre herself in New York City.
Jerrod Delaine
School of Architecture, Construction Management and Real Estate Practice
This research analyzes the interplay between the built environment and education outcomes.
Ryan Devlin
School of Architecture, Historic Preservation and Undergraduate Architecture
Taconic Fellowship
Enhancing Access to Healthy Food began in the fall of 2021 with background research focused on cart design, and archival work helped to build a record of historic cart design in New York City. Our research informed new ideas and served to highlight New York City’s long history of street vending, while also demonstrating the ways in which vending by immigrants is an integral element of the city’s heritage. We also researched the legalities of vending to understand the complexities of the regulatory environment of vending in general and cart design in particular.
Robert Adrianne Gomez, MS City and Regional Planning ’21
School of Architecture, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
This engaging and participatory toolkit can aid in better visualization, as well as communicate the intent of improving the urban quality of living through collaborative design.
Andres Roncal, BArch ’22
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Machine Empiricism aims to create a robotic and autonomous system in hard-to-access sites affected by natural disasters in order to assess site conditions and build temporary infrastructure with in-situ materials.
Ariane Harrison and Yuxiang Chen
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
The Pollinators Pavilion is an intelligent analogous habitat for native cavity-dwelling bees; it both communicates data harvested from its monitoring system, addressing the gap in scientific knowledge on native bees, and introduces these overlooked yet critical pollinators to a broad public, promoting biodiversity and ecosystem restoration.
Hannah Bacsoka, BArch ’23; Defne Celtikci, BArch ’23; Ileana Hernandez, BArch ’23; Meera Ilahi, BArch ’23
School of Architecture, Undergraduate Architecture
Pop-Up Drop-Off investigates design activism around plastic waste in New York State using lightweight inflatable structures. The structure stands as a physical visualization of plastic film, waste-related environmental issues, such as plastic bag recycling.
Ayesha Aghar, MArch ’22; Sokaina Asar, MArch ’23; Catherine Chattergoon, BArch ’24; Jared Rice, BArch ’22; Michelle Singer, BArch ’22; Jubin Titus, MSArch ’21
School of Architecture, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Taconic Fellowship
The Green Stitch: Knitting Communities Together One Garden at a Time is a project that focuses on better connecting community gardens with their local communities, offering our students’ design abilities and Pratt Institute’s resources to aid community gardens in becoming inclusive and involved community cornerstones.
Emily Ann Surabian, MPS Art Therapy and Creative Development ’21
School of Art, Art Therapy and Creative Development
Connection in Isolation used a heuristic art-based approach, while exploring the effects of telehealth on the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic presence on the field of art therapy through the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jackie Proszynski, MPS Art Therapy and Creative Development ’21
School of Art, Creative Arts Therapy
Connection in Isolation used a heuristic art-based approach, while exploring the effects of telehealth on the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic presence on the field of art therapy through the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chang Liu, MPS ’23 and Sage Callen, MPS ’23
School of Art, Arts and Cultural Management
NFTs and Art Management: Disruptive Technologies and Application Scenarios in the Future will analyze the evolution of the market, investigate stakeholders, curate crypto art institutions, and explore co-ownership models and resale dynamics through collaboration with China’s NFT platform.
Elijah Nadler, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’23
School of Art, Arts and Cultural Management
Outdoor Dining in the Age of COVID: Placemaking, Arts-Based Streetscapes and Greening Cities examines sidewalk cafes and their impact on the urban landscape of New York City and the potential for a “greening” of the city. As dining structure designs became more complex and creative throughout 2020, they crossed into public art and contributed to New York’s creative milieu.
Shannon Ebner
School of Art, Photography
Pounds Per Image (PPI), published annually through the Pratt Photography Imprint, (PPI), is a serial experiment in pedagogy through the activities of publishing.
Eric Trenkamp
School of Art, Film/Video
Through an analysis of a wide variety of Hollywood films, Race, War, and the Cinemaic Myth: Dust That Never Settles demonstrates the industry’s history of popularizing White supremacy and the ways in which these films can act as propaganda to support various dehumanizing US policies, both abroad and at home.
Katherine Williams, MPS Art Therapy and Creative Development ’22
School of Art, Creative Arts Therapy
Frontline Healthcare Workers (FHW) have an increased risk of experiencing mental health challenges as a result of working through the COVID-19 pandemic. The Strength of a Scribble: Using Bilateral Art Therapy to Mitigate Traumatic Stress Among Frontline Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic investigates the efficacy of using an art therapy intervention created by the primary investigator to mitigate traumatic stress experienced by FHW.
Rhonda Schaller and Esmilda Abreu
School of Continuing Education and Professional Studies
The Mindfulness Collaboratory is curious about the role of contemplative practices, mindfulness, and creative self-care on aiding focus, positive uplift, and resilience for the benefit of artists and arts leaders.
Tessa Maffucci
School of Design, Fashion Design
Creative Fabric: Mapping Community Connection in NYC’s Garment District is a digital humanities project that employs both geographic and network mapping to illustrate the relationships within New York City’s Garment District necessary to sustain this creative ecosystem.
Varnika Kundu, MID ’22 and Jay Jeon, MFA Digital Arts ’23
School of Design
School of Art
Curative is a mixed reality experience exploring computational creativity, authorship, and encoded accountability.
Dhruv Mishra, MID ’22
School of Design, Industrial Design
Graphia is a graphic, tablet-based tool that helps children write essays in a creative and visual way, while simultaneously capable of diagnosing learning disabilities behind the scenes with an AI model.
Hannah Berkin-Harper
School of Design, Industrial Design
Events that require street closures have unique needs like rapid set up and take down, use of durable materials, and accessibility for community members. Creating beautiful and inviting spaces encourages participation, but often street events are furnished with some folding chairs and pop-up tents at best. Multigenerational Active Streets’ goal is to create objects that form spaces with opportunities for new active programming for people of all ages.
Irina Schneid
School of Design, Interior Design
Participatory Education: Supporting Community Engagement Within and Beyond the Classroom sought to document the current state of civic engagement across the institute.
Jon Otis and Kaelee Helms, MFA Interior Design ’22
School of Design, Interior Design
Sound of Space | Space of Sound endeavors to inform and enlighten about the integration of sound within interior space.
Jean Brennan and Maria Gracia Echeverria
School of Design, Graduate Communications Design
We seek to move beyond the subject of ‘sustainability’ as a purely material discussion and invite students to build empathy and interconnectedness with the living and breathing world.
Selin Miskavi, BID ’22
School of Design, Industrial Design
Tackl Board is a cutting board with attachments for kitchen use and considers cooks with less mobility or strength in one hand.
Amanda Huynh and Dr. Daniel Leithinger (CU Boulder)
School of Design, Industrial Design
How do we design socio-technical support systems so that networks of children can engage together in collaborative, social, and embodied design?
Craig MacDonald and Elena Villaespesa
School of Information
Despite the rapid growth in the User Experience (UX) industry, many museums and cultural heritage institutions struggle to apply UX methods due to a misunderstanding of key UX principles, an inability to provide sufficient resources to support UX work, or some combination thereof.
Monica Maceli
School of Information
Physical computing devices, such as sensors, microcontrollers, and low-cost single board computers (e.g. Raspberry Pi, Arduino), have found a natural home within the library makerspace.
Olivia Turpin, MS Information Experience Design ’22
School of Information
Say it with an Emoji: Mapping Sentiment During the #MeToo Twitter Movement is a data visualization project that explores how we use emojis to communicate sentiment online.
Christine Tenny, MS Data Analytics and Visualization ’22; Christy Laperriere, MS Information Experience Design ’22, and Eesha Parasnis, MS Information Experience Design ’23
School of Information
With the 2022 school year representing a turn towards a hybrid model, The New Normal: Best Practices for Virtual Learning Communities in a Hybrid World was an opportunity to track these findings to understand how they could be mitigated in the future should the Institute ever have to return to a fully remote model of learning and educating.
M. Cristina Pattuelli
School of Information
The Semantic Lab at Pratt uses linked open data to facilitate digital arts and humanities research.
Erica Morawski
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, History of Art and Design
Development Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean reveals how hotel design came to represent ideas about development that variably coalesced and clashed with issues of sovereignty, national identity, and geopolitics.
Cindie Kehlet, Jeanne Pfordresher, and Helio Takai
Center for Material Science
Most printed circuit boards are not designed to last long but they are difficulty to recycle because the copper can’t be separated from the resin board.
Jennifer E. Telesca, PhD
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Social Science and Cultural Studies
At a time of mass extinction, when one million species face their ultimate and final decease, evidence is mounting: deep-sea hydrothermal vents, scientists believe, are the birthplace of life on Earth.
Eleonora Del Federico
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Mathematics and Science
In the early 20th century there was a call to experiment with new materials and break free from the long-standing traditional methods of artmaking.
Lara Allen
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Intensive English Program
My research is on mental health with a particular emphasis on institutional abuse committed by “the troubled teen industry.” It focuses on the ways artistic practice can not only relieve but make use of what society deems mental illness.
Uzma Z. Rizvi, SLAS and Can Sucuoglu, Information
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
School of Information
The Laboratory for Integrative Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH) makes connections between technology, archaeological data management, and heritage practice.
Amy Guggenheim
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Humanities and Media Studies
In the belief that the dynamic collision between disciplines, personalities, and processes gives rise to experimentation, innovation, and inquiry, the Vision Room aims to revitalize our work and our pedagogy.
Rafael De Balanzo Joue
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Math and Science
The goal of the Transition Design and Resilience Thinking Workshop for Artist Migrants is to support cultural agents in successfully integrating in their new cultural ecosystem by giving them more tools to do so.
Aaron Beebe, Interim Executive Director
Provost
As an outward-facing research center of Pratt Institute, the Consortium for Research & Robotics (CRR) engages in innovative design research by using frontier technologies.
Can Sucuoglu
Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI)
Each year, a different theme is developed to challenge artists to surface hidden stories, patterns, and connections in data, while examining the shortcomings of this data and question its claims to objectivity.
Daniel Bergman, Director, Center for Art, Design and Community Engagement K-12 and Drue Schwartz, MA Art and Design Education ’20
Provost
The Center K-12 launched an exciting new partnership with Brooklyn Community Services (BCS) to offer after-school visual arts programming at two NYCHA facilities. BCS’s internal research showed that there was strong interest in visual arts programming in the communities they serve. Our partnership was developed in response to aspirations expressed by the community.
Juan Jofre Lora and Gloria Fan Duan
Office of the Provost, Foundation
The Parallel Conservatory aims to digitize and expand the Pratt Foundation Lab collection in order to create a social practice platform for reflexive institutional critique.
