AI + Design Mini-Symposium

Kory Bieg, AIA, is founder and principal of OTA+, an architecture, design and research office specializing in the application of advanced digital technologies for the visualization and fabrication of projects of all types and scale. He is also an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. He has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, California College of the Arts and the Academy of Art University. He has lectured about his work at the University of Virginia, University of New Mexico, Auburn University, and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.

Bieg earned his Master of Architecture from Columbia University in New York City, where he received a William Kinne Fellowship and the Honor Award for Excellence in Design, and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis. Bieg is a member of the American Institute of Architects, NCARB Certified, and a registered architect in the state of California, Texas, and Missouri.

Bieg is the chair of TxA Emerging Design + Technology, a member of the Board of Directors of ACADIA, and a Co-director of TEX-FAB.

Ian Bogost is a philosopher, computationalist, and award-winning game designer.

His ten books include Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Nick Montfort), Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games.

Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits on science, technology, design, and culture. He is co-editor of the Platform Studies book series, about how the technical design of computing systems influences creativity, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, about the secret lives of ordinary things.

Bogost’s games about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which was a finalist at the Independent Games Festival and won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the IndieCade Festival.

Chandler Ahrens is an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis as well as a co-founder of Open Source Architecture (OSA), an international transdisciplinary collaboration developing research and commissioned projects. His focus is on the intersection of material investigations, environmental phenomena, and computational design processes.

Ahrens’ teaching has been recognized with an Emerging Faculty Award from the Building Technology Educators Society. His teaching has been recognized with an Emerging Faculty Award from the Building Technology Educators Society. His work with OSA has received several AIA Design Awards, a Chicago Athenaeum New American Architecture Award, Chicago Athenaeum Good Green award, and Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design award, and is part of the permanent collection at the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) in Orleans, France. He is the editor of Instabilities and Potentialities, Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture (2019), co-curator and editor of the Gen(h)ome Project (2006), and co-chair and editor for the exhibition Evolutive Means, ACADIA2010. He was on the board of directors for ACADIA.

Prior to OSA, Ahrens worked for several large international architectural firms including nine years as a senior project designer at Morphosis Architects, where he was responsible for notable builds such as the New Academic Building at Cooper Union in New York; Hypo-Alpe Adria bank in Udine, Italy; Emerson College in Los Angeles; Embassy in London; and Phare Tower in Paris. He was a visiting professor at the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Lyon, France, from 2014-2018.

Matthew Allen researches the history and theory of architecture, computation, and aesthetics. Allen is the author of the forthcoming book, Architecture becomes Programming: Modernism and the Computer, 1960-1990, as well as essays in venues such as Log, e-flux, Domus, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Allen holds a PhD and a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and other institutions. Allen has worked for MOS, Preston Scott Cohen, and other firms at the leading edge of contemporary architectural practice.

Sharvari Mhatre is a lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Her architectural interest lies in exploring the entangled realities in which contemporary life is embedded and enhancing the vibrance of that complexity by using available, non-traditional and emerging technologies to design spaces. She holds a master of science in advanced architectural design from the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a bachelor of architecture with a concentration in morphology from Pratt Institute.

She is currently an architectural designer at Cecil Baker + Partners based in Philadelphia. She was previously an assistant lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught design studios that focused on artificial intelligence, digital and robotic fabrication. In the summer of 2020, she was a design fellow at PennPraxis at the University of Pennsylvania, re-imagining a former slate quarry as a heritage park linked to a growing trail system in Pennsylvania’s Slate Belt.

Constance Vale is an assistant professor and chair of undergraduate architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She has previously taught at SCI-Arc and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a licensed architect and director of the architecture practice Constance Vale Studio and the experimental research office The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors. She undertakes aesthetic and conceptual investigations in the territory between architecture, art, theater, and emerging technology.

Vale is the editor and a coauthor of the forthcoming Graham Foundation-supported book, Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. The symposium “Decoys and Depictions: Images of the Digital,” which Vale led in fall 2019, builds upon this research. She is also collaborating with Yevgeniy Vorobeychik in the McKelvey School of Engineering on The Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving and recently curated the related Kemper Art Museum Teaching Gallery exhibition The Autonomous Future of Mobility. In addition, she is among the architects recently selected for the international housing competition On Olive, which will result in a commissioned house in St. Louis. In 2015, Vale collaborated with Emmett Zeifman to complete a temporary pavilion in downtown Los Angeles for the experimental opera Hopscotch. Vale’s work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, The Sheldon, and the Farrell Learning & Teaching Center, and published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the Los Angeles Times, Archinect, and CLOG.

Vale earned an MArch from Yale School of Architecture, where she received the Moulton Andrus Award for Excellence in Art and Architecture and two Feldman Nominations, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. She has practiced at nationally and internationally recognized offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and her hometown of Pittsburgh.

Jonathan Hanahan is a creative technologist and educator who loves the internet but is equally terrified by it.

He uses technology to critique technology. His speculative practice explores the physical, cultural, and social ramifications of digital experiences and the role technology plays in shaping our everyday realities. He makes Thick Interfaces. These are tools, devices, software, artifacts, websites, and videos that agitate the digital facade and reveal the complexity existing underneath the thin veneer of our devices.

Hanahan earned his BArch from Virginia Tech and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to his studio practice, Hanahan is an assistant professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches creative coding, procedural process, and interaction design. He is also the co-founder and co-chair of Fox Fridays, an interdisciplinary workshop series encouraging experimentation with tools, processes, and technology.

Caitlin Kelleher is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction and focuses on designing new kinds of programming environments and languages that democratize programming. Recently, her research group has focused on supporting children learning to program independently. This research has resulted in new kinds of support for tutorials, code execution history exploration tools, and robust support for reusing code from unfamiliar programs. Additionally, her group has explored how to support learning from code puzzles and the kinds of learning decisions young novices make in open ended contexts. The results of this research are shared through the Looking Glass programming environment, available at lookingglass.wustl.edu.

Kelleher joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. She is the recipient of an NSF Career award and was named a 2013 Sloan Foundation Fellow. Her work has won several best paper awards at top conferences.

Alvitta Ottley is an assistant professor in the computer science & engineering department at Washington University in St. Louis. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the department of psychological & brain sciences. Her research uses interdisciplinary approaches to solve problems such as how best to display information for effective decision-making and how to design human-in-the-loop visual analytics interfaces that are more attuned to how people think.

Ottley’s research interests include information visualization, human-computer interaction and visual analytics. She applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically learn analysts’ goals, cognitive traits and future behavior from data interaction logs. Her team uses interdisciplinary approaches to support decision-making in various domains, such as health communication, intelligence analysis and scientific discovery, with research contributions that have won the best paper and honorable mention awards at the Visualization top venues.

Ottley received an NSF CRII Award in 2018 for using visualization to support medical decision-making, the NSF Career Award for creating context-aware visual analytics systems, and the 2022 EuroVis Early Career Award. In addition, her work has appeared in leading conferences and journals such as CHI, VIS, and TVCG, achieving the best paper and honorable mention awards.

Heather Snyder Quinn joined the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts as assistant professor in design futures in 2022. She came to Washington University in St. Louis from DePaul University, where she was an assistant professor of design in the College of Computing and Digital Media, as well as a 2021-22 Wicklander Fellow from DePaul’s Institute for Business and Professional Ethics and a 2021-22 OpEd Public Voice Fellow from DePaul’s College of Communications. Her work uses design fiction to challenge technocratic power and imagine the future impacts of emerging technology on human freedoms. Snyder Quinn regularly serves as a bridge between academia and industry. Her writing is published by The World Economic Forum, Slanted Magazine, and AIGA. Her project “Using Speculative Design to Inform Tech Policy for the Metaverse” was presented at Yale Law School’s Technologies of Deception Conference. Most recently, Snyder Quinn launched “Mariah: Acts of Resistance,” a site-specific, augmented reality application that narrates stories of historical injustice through the backdrop of significant cultural institutions and the funding that has allowed them to exist. Mariah has received considerable press from The Washington Post and Hyperallergic.

She earned her BFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design in 1996 and taught there from 2001-2010. In 2018 she earned her MFA in graphic design from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Aaron Bobick joined Washington University in St. Louis as Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the James M. McKelvey Professor in 2015. Prior to WashU, he was a professor and founding chair of the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the faculty since 1999.

Bobick’s research primarily focuses on action recognition by computer vision, a field in which he is a pioneer. Recently he has extended his research to robot perception for human-robot collaboration. While at Georgia Tech, he served as director of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, an internationally known research center in computer vision, graphics, ubiquitous computing, and human-computer interaction, and helped develop a computational media bachelor’s degree program and doctoral programs in robotics and human centered computing.

Bobick is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science and his doctorate in cognitive science. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, he served as a member of the MIT Media Laboratory faculty, where he led the Media Lab Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Video Surveillance and Monitoring Project, as well as its Dynamic Scene Analysis research effort.

He also has served as a senior area chair for numerous international computer vision conferences and as program chair for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. He has founded a variety of successful startup companies, is a distinguished scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery, and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2014.