Carnegie Mellon School of Design

During the week after finals (May 8-15, 2020), the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design came together and created "Rapidly Evolving," a response to the lockdown. The Students, Faculty and Staff did what they do best: they made. They made for and with one another. They made to help fill the gap, to help bring back some of that closeness lost by coronavirus.

Design students, faculty and staff, please click HERE to contribute to "Rapidly Evolving." NOTE: You must be logged in to your School of Design account first.

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Sharon Lee

Introducing Zoom Agenda: a real-time ticker that tracks your meeting agenda to help you wrap up your meetings on time.

Catherine Yochum

There's no right answer in watercolor, things don't turn out the way you expect, and sometimes that makes them better. The paintings I've made this spring are a mix of living rooms I've saved on Pinterest (as we are all "exploring the great indoors") and places that are meaningful to my friends (who will or have already received these in the mail).

Joseph Kim

During quarantine, I began playing around on Figma. I start with one vector shape and by implementing a strict pattern for the coordinates and transformations, I was able to create visually intriguing designs.

Shuyu Jenny Liu

Many designers have their own design heroes that guided their lives and careers. For me, it is Dr. Edward Tufte. In this video project, I created a short animation to showcase and celebrate his inspirational book designs, data visualizations, and landscape arts.▪

Mark Mentzer

So.... my house and neighborhood paintings are taking on new meanings. This one is still drying. The idea is since we can’t get out much I would put my house on blocks, install wheels and drive my house through the neighborhood.

Persuasion Class

While all of us were grappling with the challenge of adjusting routines, environments and relations to confinement and virtual modes of work and leisure, the Persuasion class and coursework became a promising platform. In it, students were able to interact and develop their work as a way to support their peers, looking at ways to positively influence and motivate themselves to cope with the different challenges arising during quarantined lives. Persuasion, Spring 2020 Instructors: Dan Lockton & Silvana Juri

Nick Marotta

I had a lot of fun working on this project for Dylan Vitone's moving pictures class. It became an escape from the seriousness of everything going on- one where asking "can I eat vegetables underwater?" was a productive question.

Hannah Cai

A series of digital collages shining light on the different surreal scenarios people are going through right now due to the coronavirus. Hopefully, these will inspire greater compassion and empathy for others, as well as more awareness of our own fortune and privileges.

Elizabeth Wang

i've been getting a sense of comfort during quarantine from observing nature reclaiming the urban landscape.

Matthew McGehee

I made the Symbiotic Mask as a way to comment on DIY PPE, as well as to reflect on how returning to my home in nature has helped me start to overcome the sense of fear brought by the pandemic. The mask is about having a mutually beneficial relationship with nature: through its use there is a cyclical exchange of essential resources between the wearer and the native wildflower in its mobile terrarium.

Matthew McGehee

I made the Aromatic Mask as a way to comment on DIY PPE, as well as to reflect on how returning to my home in nature has helped me address the sense of isolation brought by the pandemic. The mask is about fostering a meaningful relationship with nature. Before the mask is worn out in public, its chamber must be filled with plant matter that the wearer gathers each day. In doing so, they build awareness and empathy for the natural environment around them.

Matt Z

For fun stuff between demos

Mason Young-Shor

I made this video for Dylan's moving pictures class from quarantine in squirrel hill. I've been inspired by the beauty of this song since I heard it in theatre so I did my best to find little bits of beauty in my room.

Katie Chen, Ethan Ye, Sherry Wu, Supawat V.

The nutrition label has always been made for a "standardized" person and hasn't seen much visual change since it's creation over a decade ago. Wholestory allows shoppers to create a customized label to suit their food needs and nutrition goals and use AR to project their new food label over existing food items while they're shopping.

Katie Chen

A series of portraits drawn on the ipad.

Langston Wells

Working on a personal project for 100 days that deals with overcoming obstacles.

Chelsea Liu

A photographic reflection amid the COVID-19 crisis

Yoshi Torralva

I made an animated music video of Omara Portuondo's song, "¿Dónde estabas tú?" (Where were you?) Class: Moving Pictures Professor: Dylan Vitone

Yoshi Torralva

In this video, Lagerfeld's most iconic fashion shows and looks are woven together to capture the life of one of the most prolific fashion designers of our time. Class: Sophomore Communication Design Studio Professor: Brett Yasko

maddy cha

i have not worn a real outfit for weeks now so i thought it would be fun to mock-up a dress up game video :—) hope u enjoy!

maddy cha

i missed bothering dylan in smillie so i recreated it in animal crossing! (this is a screenshot of the game i don't know how to 3d model)

Julie Choi

Junior communication students have visualized a large set of data from the AIGA Design Census through a visual installation. With two different axes being gender and age, each demographic is represented by a dodecahedron which contains visualized data regarding job titles, salary, stability, satisfaction, and passionate issues. Having displayed comprehensive insights, many visitors and other designers can physically walk through and observe the vast information from eye-level from one group to another.

allissa chan

goodbye feelings (please don't repost/ reupload anywhere)

Mihika Bansal

For my Design for Social Service and Innovation class, I created an online awareness campaign for young consumers. The campaign is aimed to encourage them to make sustainable buying decisions by tying their stated values on large problems to specific items that they consume. The goal with this project is to slowly change consumer's mindsets and give them the information they need to make better fashion purchasing decisions.

Andrea Benatar

This is a series of images I have shot over the past several years, in which I passively observe pedestrians walking through the streets. Whether it be someone walking past a familiar route on their way to work or a tourist discovering uncharted territory, you can learn a lot about people just by the way they walk. Or stroll. Or run. This photo journal takes a moment to just acknowledge that.

Hannah du Plessis

“How are you?” asks my neighbor. “I am so, so, so many things,” I reply. “Well,” he shrugs, “If you paid full price for the ticket, you might as well stay for the whole show.” In these writings I share moments of living through this COVID-19 show.

Proud Taranat

A set of images photographed in under the prompt "Letters to your Future Self". I went around my boyfriend's neighbourhood and photographed his friends from their windows while remaining socially distanced. By using journal entries dating all the way up to the end of spring break, I reflected on how my past experiences could help me overcome the obstacles I'm currently facing amidst the Coronavirus outbreak.

Liam van Oort

A series of dried flowers on top of images taken in the context of quarantine. This reflection of my last semester portrays a sense of forced optimism as well as genuine joy in my environment and moment in life.

Dorcas Lin

What does civic engagement look like in the age of surveillance capitalism? This poster series explores what privacy means in the digital age by drawing parallels between surveillance and exploitation that treats the human experience as a free raw material and showcases the complexities that make creating regulation so difficult. The three posters scale from the perspective of the individual to the U.S. court system and to the Tech Giants by following the narrative of Doug Pulaski, a fictitious character who endures the consequences of exposure.

Serina Liu

No one actually asked for my opinion on anything... but that has very rarely stopped me before so I've been trying to do a weekly illustration centered around an opinion I have and invite the people of Instagram to tell me their opinions... I made my account public for this, so tell me your opinion! Let's ARGUE! Please... :-(

dylan vitone

everyday the kids and I walk to the park. over the past week I recorded those trips. it is our new normal. we run, we explore, we build. at first I focused on what rituals were lost due to the virus. they do a pretty good job showing me what was gained.

dylan vitone

everyday the kids and I walk to park. over the past week I recorded those trips. it is our new normal. we run, we explore, we build. at first I focused on what rituals were lost due to the virus. they do a pretty good job showing me what was gained.

An image of imago, a kit of blocks to guide inspiration and resenstivity to children's surroundings

Elena Deng

Why: For children 4–6 years old, playtime/recess is a critical time for kids to develop key soft skills and values. At school there are communal toys, items, and spaces that are shared. During lockdown in a home, that sense of a shared experience is taken away, further perpetuated by differences in available resources amongst peers. What: This project explores the potential of a kit given to all students who have just started daycare to facilitate playtime and development of core soft skills through fun and imaginative play. How: A kit of low-cost items or “building blocks” provided by the school with room for manipulation to incorporate items from respective households and allow creative opportunity using resources from the home. The creations can be followed by prompts and suggestions from instructors and can encourage students and parents to reach out to their peers with this communal kit. A 3D object scanning app for creation upload into the virtual space will be provided for each instructor's individual playspace.

Stacie Rohrbach

Given our current situation, one of our masters students stated that it would be fun and useful to get School of Design masks made for everyone in their cohort. I thought this was a terrific idea and something I could do for them as sewing has become a creative outlet for me over the past several years. Therefore, I got to work as I wanted to help our students protect themselves, show them that I care about their well-being, and that I’m thinking about them. I hope the masks brighten the students' day and I look forward to seeing their smiling faces again soon, even if it’s behind fields of bright orange! And a shout out to seniors and doctoral students—I would have loved to make some for you too but they take quite a bit of time, and I just didn't have any more to spare in the past two weeks. In the event that more people want them I'll see what I can do over the summer. Enjoy!

Mason Young-Shor

Typographic posters that visualize corona virus/social distancing/quarantine data visualized through shared struggles and humor with a call for trying to be ok.

CeCe Liu

inspired by the painting "christina's world", esther dong (the model) and I tried to make sense of the current and enjoy what is still tangible in our lives.

CeCe Liu

since March, I have been living with the Parker's family in rural Michigan. As i pick up yard work and enjoy what midwest can offer, it gets harder and harder to explain to zoom classmates what "work" means in a village. I want to celebrate the beauty in farm life and update my friends on my new stage of mind.

Patricia Yu

The Exercise Companion is an assistive device for an older adult that would improve a certain aspect of their daily routine. We collaborated with a client over Zoom and communicated with them throughout this process to help us decide our design intervention. The problem we decided to tackle was how we could make our client's daily exercise routine more interesting by creating a guide that could not only lead the exercise sequence, but make act as a friend for the process more engaging and to create more accountability in their actions. The device is a hand-sized interactive device that will shuffle an exercise routine and encourage one to finish each session. The device will say the exercise title through speakers and it will also display the exercise title on its screen in the front. You communicate to the device when you have completed that exercise by making a loud sound (this means that the environment you are working out in should not have too many loud noises or disturbances). The device will track your overall progress with the exercise routines and at the very end, it will congratulate you that you have accomplished all the exercises.

CeCe Liu

Inspired by the painting "christina's world", Esther Dong (the model) and I tried to make sense of the current and enjoy what is still tangible in our lives.

Emily Zhou

Did you know that mosses and fungi are considered national treasures in countries across the world? But when it comes to things like public appeal and biodiversity loss, they are unjustly associated with dilapidation and are too often left out of the conversation. The anti-terrarium is a grow pod that lets you cultivate moss, lichen, and fungi in the comfort of your home. Let the widespread appeal of fungi seep beyond the walls of r/mushrooms and into your household.

Sophia Kim, Jenna Kim, Stefano DiDonato, Mimi Jiao

Over the span of less than half a year, the world has drastically changed its operations in a direct battle against the novel corona-virus. This zine captures a small sliver of how the world is reacting. By sourcing opinions and news from different media outlets, we reinterpreted the information through our own lens.

Caroline Song

Take a look into the unique and colorful design process of Leta Sobierajski, and her partnership with her husband, Wade Jeffree.

Maddie Headrick

A series of gifs that represent my time in Pittsburgh over the past four years. From the countless walks in Schenley park to the places I've called home, these pictures are a glimpse into the time I have spent in Pittsburgh. While COVID-19 put a sudden end to many of these experiences, I've decided to be thankful instead for all the memories I did make in these places.

Liam van Oort, Matthew Mcgehee

“QuaranLeem McGehee” is a freeform collaborative zine we are working on as a way to stay connected during quarantine, and express our complex feelings about this time. We hope you enjoy peering into the depths of our souls as you peruse the pages!

Tate Johnson

Bricolage exploration that involved compositing form elements of a discarded plastic laundry basket and pillbox onto a pair of repurposed Converse Chuck Taylors.

Karen Escarcha

A co-creation collage activity with my quarantine partner-in-crime.

Daphne Peters

We had to cancel a trip to visit family this summer. I've been doing little illustrations imagining what parts of our trip would have been like. I'm thinking of putting them together as a book that my parents and kids can read together to form memories of spending time together in new ways.

Jackie Chou

While at home, I created my own pinhole camera out of an oatmeal container. I shot frames around my neighborhood with it, and developed the images in a homemade Caffenol-C developer made with instant coffee. After I experimented with a homemade camera, I bought a professionally made pinhole camera to capture more refined images.

Gary Tang

Digital submission for fanart contest commemorating the official release of Risk of Rain 2

Franklin Guttman

Animated video about isolation and workaholism (workholism? worklism? workalclism?? thats a tough one) within cities of us together. Set to Vienna. Course: Moving Pictures Professor: Dylan "Whoopsie" Vitone

Liam van Oort

Before our semester at CMU was uprooted, I debuted a line of clothing name Eurowestern at the Lunar Gala fashion show. This unisex line uses recycled materials as a visualization of the contrasted upbringing between Dutch and Texan. These images are a connection between a contextualization of the concept I built and the environment of my quarantine. Please visit https://www.liamvanoort.com/ for more.

Hannah Kim

From March to May 2020, I photographed this corner of the universe. Quarantine has allowed me to slow down, reflect and take in this quietness in the midst of all of the chaos the world was going through.

Maddie Headrick

A work in progress exploration of frame by frame animation with music

Matt Geiger

A mouse redesigned to accommodate the new normal of working remotely. Includes "instant replay" functions to give users the ability to track and review their short-term computer activity as well as built-in control for microphone muting.

Sebastian Carpenter

As an ongoing project, I've been making collaborative art with friends and family in lockdown by faxing them AI-generated drawing prompts. The prompts are generated and sent completely by a computer, so I have no idea what the participant has received until I get their drawings faxed back to me. What is most interesting in this project is seeing the drawings people produce when the prompt doesn't quite make sense. This project is still ongoing, so if you have a fax machine and would like to get involved, feel free to contact me at scarpent@andrew.cmu.edu

Shambhavi Deshpande

This project is my response for educators in the coronavirus pandemic, undertaken as a part of the Design for Social Innovation course in the Spring 2020 semester with expert guidance from Arthi Krishnaswami.

Yufei Wang

This is actually a project for an animation class. But I just want to share it here since I really enjoyed this project during this lockdown. I spent way too much time on this [that I probably shouldn't] and glad to see the result :P

Sherry Wu

Some random sketches with no particular theme

Raelynn O'Leary

Collecting specimens for a quarantine herbarium has prompted me to reflect on how plants can be a strong connection to time and place.

June Seo Youn

I recently acquired a 1:18 scale model of a beige Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0. I wished I had an orange one.

Supawat Vitoorapakorn

Grow independence from cooperate food systems. Up-cycled hydroponics starter kit and online support delivered to you in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. www.growgrowgrow.org

Anna Gross

A reflective exploration on death and ghosts.

Ian Shei, Meijie Hu, Nina Yoo, Davis Dunaway

Information privacy in the digital age is an ever-growing issue. It seems like almost every week there is a news story about how an app or service is abusing their users' data. Despite the frequency of these occurrences and the outrage of the public, a large majority of people freely give up their personal data to companies that are less than reputable. Our group wanted to see if we could promote more responsible decision making. After an inquiry into how people tend to approach data privacy, we created an enhanced permission prompt that builds on existing permission request frameworks. The design of our prompt enables users to make better-informed decisions about their privacy through the simplicity of its graphics and use of color. It presents an easily-digestible summary of the app’s privacy policies as they relate to the permission you’re being asked to accept. Services like this already exist to some extent – one prominent example being “Terms Of Service; Didn’t Read”, a 3rd party website that assigns ratings to websites based on their terms of service and privacy policies. We also envisioned how such a feature could be implemented by hooking into the existing app development and review process.

Robert Managad

Image still from animated video. These past couple of months, I've been able to do a little more of a past hobby of mine: star-gazing.

Anna Gross

A collection of sketches done within and outside of class

Meijie Hu, Miranda Luong, Ian Shei, Supawat Vitoorapakorn

In the near-future, eating in spaceflight has evolved thanks to the continued development of existing methods and techniques. Certain fruits and vegetables can now be grown and harvested on long-term missions. Our appliance adapts current cooking methods of baking, air-frying, poaching, and steaming to combine fresh and prepared ingredients. The accompanying dumpling recipe also provides astronauts with more variety and possibilities for customization. Preparing the filling, wrapping, and cooking the dumplings is both an activity to be shared and a delicious meal of layered flavors and textures. Created for The Interplanetary Cookbook media.mit.edu/projects/interplanetary-cookbook

Supawat Vitoorapakorn, Max Stropkay, Asher Blackburn

Upcycled home goods from abandoned 20th century communication cables.

Elysha Tsai

Casual sketches and compositions in my personal sketchbook.

Christine Chen

A simple pictogram how Covid-19 have change our lives. Captions (left to right, then top to bottom): 1. Tissue Hauls 2. At-Home Workouts 3. Domination of Online Shopping 4. Dalgona Coffee 5. Social Distancing 6. Work from Home 7. Virtual Weddings 8. Post Covid 15 9. Animal Crossing Friends