Most Americans haven’t heard of Kansei design, which studies how emotion drives consumer choices. For example, designers of the Mazda Miata sports car used Kansei engineering in developing the car’s gear shift. Their analysis spurred designers to change the throw between each gear so it’s shorter than most manual transmission shift lengths—leading the driver to feel more “powerful.”
A&AA welcomes these new tenure-track faculty members for the 2016–17 academic year.
Architect magazine named ZGF Architects, founded in Portland, Oregon, the No. 1 design firm nationwide—both overall and in sustainable design. Five of the firm’s current partners are graduates of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts and more than 70 A&AA alumni work for ZGF globally.
A University of Oregon team of landscape architecture students has defeated professional competitors again, this time by winning the Living Product Prize in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge.
Wheelchair rugby athletes at the Rio 2016 Paralympics this month are getting an edge from gear designed in part by students in a University of Oregon product design studio. A story in the October 2016 Portland Monthly shows how the US national team worked with UO in Portland students to create performance-boosting wearable designs, including arm guards and gloves.
“I felt like there was something missing,” Tinker Hatfield, BArch ’77, tells Sneakernews in its September 12 issue, remembering how he has helped design Duck athletes’ traveling gear since 2011. “I felt like there could be this excitement driven by leveraging the history of the Jordan Brand.” In the Sneakernews story, Hatfield looks back at the entire line of Air Jordan shoes from 2011 to today’s Air Jordan XIV, including a peek at his design sketches.
After nearly two decades of field research in Mongolia’s rugged backcountry to document the region’s archaeology, Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, UO professor emerita of art history, was recently honored by the Mongolian government for her leadership in preserving that nation’s cultural heritage. Around the O recently featured an extensive profile about her work, which integrates human culture and landscape.
UO Department of Product Design undergraduates won two of three possible $3,000 awards in the 2015-2016 INTERZINC Challenge, a theme-based competition which this year asked engineering and design students nationwide to design camping products made from zinc.
Four UO architecture students—Alex Kendle, Michael Meer, Greg Stacy, and Benjamin Wright—garnered second place in the 2015–16 Timber in the City: Urban Habitat Competition, as reported in the Portland Business Journal. The four competed against 846 students with their project called Hybrid Domains. The UO’s second-place win earned them $7,500. Their faculty sponsors, who included Judith Sheine and Mark Donofrio, received $5,000.
For Christoph Lindner, the new dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, "university life-research, education, teaching-connects to everything." Lindner shares his enthusiasm about making those connections at the University of Oregon and A&AA's growing global reach. He brings his own far-reaching global experience to the table as well, having most recently come from Amsterdam. Read more at AroundtheO
