JENNY SABIN: The Design Tech department was created to leverage Cornell's existing and unique strengths to foster collaboration and innovation across design, engineering, biology, computer science, medicine, arts and sciences, and the built environment. What began as a pilot program that set out to test a new model for teaching, research, and making at the intersection of design and emerging technologies has now become a very exciting multicollege department operating across two campuses and bridging fields and faculty across the university. Design Tech importantly fills gaps in high-demand areas such as product interaction and digital media design. Within our areas of focus we offer design plus environments, design plus interactions, and design plus materials. 

ULI B. WIESNER: So how do you scale from the molecular all the way to the architectural scale? Non-trivial. We have now chips that basically have 20 billion field-effect transistors on a chip. I do design at the molecular level. So we have basically developed these particles that we are now injecting into cancer patients in order to do therapy. So the particles are five to six nanometers in size, which is basically the size of one of these FETs on a chip. The question that I'm asking in my research is like, how does the molecular structure of material have to look like at the scale of the human body or the scale of building? The material will perform the function that it's supposed to. Covering these different length scales all the way from the molecular to the human scale, architectural scale, that's the challenge we are trying to address. 

HEEJU TERRY PARK: I’m interested in wearable human interface. The reason I say human interface is that the clothing we are wearing is really the most intimate interface. One example of a fiber optic technology we have developed as part of a wearable device, shoes with the smart fiber optic technology. By having this kind of real-time feedback to help people doing underpronation, overpronation, and possible lower body injuries. We are very optimistic about the future of this kind of fiber optic-based wearable technology for human well-being. Embroidered sensors will provide a very reliable respiration pattern used for other kinds of health monitoring parameters. Athletes, firefighters, people who have a disability and just physical and mental differences, how can I support them by providing improved design wearable interface to help people tackle real-world issues, push the boundaries of fashion design? 

WENDY JU: The hand of design when it's done well can be invisible, so we might not notice how important It is until it's wrong, but I think it's actually really important to understand how to do it right so that when things really matter we have those skills to bring to bear. So many of the things that we use as devices are interaction limited, like the main thing that is limiting us from using all the possibility of the technology or the service is the interactions. I particularly work on interacting people with autonomous systems. One really great example of interaction limitations are autonomous cars. We have cars that can figure out where they are in the world, look at the world around them without anyone else telling them, like image the things and drive through the world on their own. But it turns out when those autonomous cars are driving the road with other human drivers or around pedestrians, they don't know what to do. If I make a gaffe, I usually know because people will react and that actually helps me understand what I should and shouldn't do. Machines aren't paying attention to those reactions that people have and so they aren't picking up on the local norms that help them behave better. So one of the things I'm interested in doing is collecting the norm-enforcing behaviors that people have and then teaching machines to be sensitive to that. 

JENNY SABIN: So one of the fundamental questions that drives my research and work and also my teaching is how might buildings and their integrated material elements behave more like organisms do in their natural environments, responding and adapting to a changing context. The project is looking at the relationships between architecture and morphogenesis and the role of context or environment and mechanics. And so we're looking at these concepts across three different systems in biology from plants to brains to the heart to start to distill a set of design drivers and rules because in nature, materials, environmental context, geometry, form, history, event, program, all of that is inextricably linked. And we think that's a pretty powerful and ecological way to think in design. 

ULI B. WIESNER: A new department means there's a new educational mission and so the mission in a radical way is to break down silos. We have these well-defined disciplines and we don't look to the left or to the right. Well it turns out we cannot afford to do that anymore. The problems we have today are so complex. We need radically different approaches to education so that students are not only deep in a particular area but they are also at least knowledgeable enough so that they can converse across a broad range of disciplines. 

JULIA BARNOIN: What is actually amazing in this program is that it's collaboration but with whatever you want, you know. You can collaborate with material sciences but also with biology. It's collaboration as like the big word. There is no limits. There is no boundary with who and how you can collaborate with other departments. 

IVANIA RIVERA: It's almost as if we get more agency in the way that we design because we're thinking about material processes, we're thinking about the aspects that typical architecture firms don't have to deal with on the daily. This program gives you more of a voice to address those concerns. 

JENNY SABIN: I believe that some of the best designers and architects make problems and then they solve them. We are in the midst of a massive paradigm shift where we're seeing the fusion and integration of the biological, the physical, and the digital where the relevance of design as a synthetic way of thinking across multiple relationships, the ability to work through that complexity to formulate a plan and a path forward is a very important element to addressing some of the key sort of questions and crises that we face. it not only is the future, it's the now. I mean this is the type of teaching, this is the type of research that we need to be engaged in.