Portland

Putting a brand on a sports product or an athlete is big business and requires careful consideration, Associate Professor Susan Sokolowski noted recently in an article on the Adobe Creative Cloud website. “The branding should be strong and recognizable to play up the benefit of being associated with a sports star, but people also should be able to understand the relationship between the parent company and athlete sub-brand,” she said. “Look at athletes who’ve had successful partnerships.

A team of UO architecture scholars has won a global prize for research into how daylight affects us at work and how window blind design can provide a more comfortable, productive workplace.

UO architecture PhD student Amir Nezamdoost and research assistant Alen Mahic won the Regional Award for The Americas in the International VELUX Award for Students of Architecture competition, presented recently at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin.

A team from the University of Oregon Department of Product Design has taken on the challenge of protecting military service members during chemical or biological attacks.

Susan Sokolowski, associate professor and director of the Sports Product Design Program, and undergraduate student Juliann Larese have made it to the final round of a Department of Defense competition to design clothing better suited for “warfighters”—soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Winners will be announced in January.

Drawn by the opportunity to work with industry innovators and creative faculty, students in the UO’s new sports product design master’s program are also finding their fellow students’ varied backgrounds ideal for collaboration. The uniquely Oregon program attracted a mechanical engineer, a soccer jersey designer, and a museum exhibit installer, among others, eager to explore the hands-on nature of sports product design. Several students formed a team that won first place in the QuackCon in October, the country’s first collegiate sports and technology hackathon competition.

Experience collages, paper wall-relief works, cardboard sculptures, silkscreen prints, and a three-minute 16mm film in the first of three UO art faculty exhibitions scheduled at White Box gallery in Portland.

Eden Powell won’t forget seeing “real spaces where people create in the New York art world,” which she experienced last March on a field trip with her “Spring Break in New York” ART 408 class. The visit included a stop at SculptureCenter, which exposed the students to “a really current, cutting edge art scene [in] a multidimensional and dynamic space,” said Powell, an undergraduate art student.

The University of Oregon in Portland’s Randy Gragg is collaborating with Oregon Public Broadcasting’s show ‘State of Wonder’ for a year-long look at Portland architecture. Gragg, the executive director of the John Yeon Center for Architecture and Landscape at the UO, is a former architecture critic at The Oregonian and editor-in-chief of Portland Monthly. “No one is more thoroughly steeped in the design character of Portland,” the State of Wonder website stated.

UO product design students captured the top two spots at QuackCon, the country’s first collegiate sports and technology hackathon competition that synthesized engineering, programming, and athletics to create innovative sports product designs in a 36-hour blitz.

An estimated $5 million real estate pledge from architect Jim Rothwell, BArch ’80, and his wife, Mary, will advance the UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts and help grow the school’s endowment. “This was a way to help out in return for what the school gave me,” says Rothwell.

History may be a common link among the 2018 class of UO Historic Preservation Program graduate students, but many also share an interest in public service, global travel, and literally digging into projects. They also share the distinction of being the first cohort of historic preservation students enrolled at the UO in Portland, where the program moved this fall.

Read more about the new preservation students at AroundtheO