As part of the interactive poster sessions, three MFA students in Design—Ali El-Chaer, Rachel Jung A. Huh, and Iris Qing Zeng—presented research-driven projects developed in their Research Methods course, which emphasizes the integration of quantitative data and qualitative narratives as a framework for climate communication.
Ali El-Chaer’s project explored the disappearance of bird species in New Jersey, combining ecological datasets with regional folk tales to situate biodiversity loss within lived cultural memory. Rachel Jung A. Huh’s work traced her father’s journey to the Arctic, bringing together family photographs and scientific measurement imagery to connect personal experience with large-scale climate observation and data collection. Iris Qing Zeng focused on color bleaching as a visual and material signal of environmental stress, translating scientific phenomena into perceptible visual language.
Together, these projects demonstrated how design-led approaches to data visualization and storytelling can make climate science legible, affective, and socially grounded, aligning with RCEI’s emphasis on the human dimensions of climate change. In parallel, animations addressing climate change created by undergraduate design students were also on display, highlighting how design education at multiple levels contributes to innovative, interdisciplinary climate communication.
Art After Manufactured Certainty : November 4, 2025
On November 4, the Mason Gross Design community hosted Burak Arikan, an artist, designer, and researcher whose work investigates how predictive systems shape culture, behavior, and power, and how art can intervene. Arikan’s practice spans network mapping, data politics, and collective intelligence, exposing the invisible economies and infrastructures that govern our digital lives. His projects have been exhibited at MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and major biennials in Venice, Berlin, Istanbul, and São Paulo. He is also the founder of Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for mapping complex data networks.
Arikan began his talk by tracing the shift from 20th-century mass media: newspapers, television, radio, to today’s algorithmic platforms. What once appeared as an open social web has transformed into an economy of prediction, where every click, post, and search is harvested to anticipate future behavior. “Speech is still free,” he said. “The problem is that cognition is engineered.” For Arikan, this condition of manufactured certainty defines our current era: a system that turns uncertainty into confidence, not to inform us, but to control us.
Through his projects, Arikan turns these predictive systems into artistic material. In one work, he developed software to forecast his own bank transactions, stamping each receipt with the algorithm’s probability. By following its predictions, he demonstrated how predictive systems can fabricate the very futures they claim to foresee. In another project, he built a platform that allowed users to “IPO themselves,” issuing shares of their identities in a speculative social marketplace. Friendship, labor, and visibility became currency, reflecting how social media monetizes our relationships.
Arikan also discussed Social Contracts (2013), a project that used blockchain technology long before NFTs became mainstream. Instead of treating digital tokens as collectibles, he framed them as social sculptures, publicly visible, constantly evolving networks of ownership and connection. Each transfer of an artwork generated new relationships, mapping the circulation of power within digital culture.
Across his body of work, Arikan outlined four key principles that guide his practice: prediction, feedback, transparency, and critical friction. Together, these form what he calls Predictive Realism, an artistic approach that examines and reshapes the predictive mechanisms embedded in everyday life. His work draws from traditions of Institutional Critique, Social Sculpture, and Fluxus, expanding them for a world governed by data and algorithms.
Arikan closed with a reflection on uncertainty as a space of freedom. If our futures are being pre-written by machines, art can restore ambiguity, reintroducing the unknown as a site of imagination and agency. “Art can reveal the infrastructures that claim to predict us,” he said, “and widen the futures we are allowed to have.”
MFA Design’s first year students took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this month as part of the Research Method’s assignment led by professor Atif Akin (he/him). They explored questions of authorship, history, and genealogy referencing readings completed in class by Michel Foucault and Nietzsche. The goal of this assignment was to look at artifacts within the MET and construct a continuous narrative or genealogy. This assignment could be about anything as long as it was in the MET at the time of the tour.
Iris (Qing Zeng, she/her), crafted a pixel solo play through game on Figma, using AI to generate the image. The viewer could explore the garden as a flower and look at formal elements of rocks, wood panels, and architecture. Her tour took place in the Asian Art wing, starting at the moon gate, traversing through the courtyard, and ending thoughtfully in the chamber. Iris has an interest in gaming software and enjoys building narratives and worlds that can engage with her viewer’s feeling of sympathy. Her own voice overlaid the play through text as well as a beautiful soundtrack that set a peaceful tone. Click here to play the game
Rachel Jung A Huh (she/her) created a zine that explored the fictional world of a dog shelter, The Canvas Shelter, where the audience could understand a dog’s reason for being placed for adoption and the busy lives of the people in the European Painting Wing. This tour captured the imagination of everyone involved, as all MFA first-year candidates on this tour had their own pups they had to leave behind.
One of the featured dogs was Reynolds, a greyhound whose refined yet confined life mirrored the contradictions of aristocratic society. His story, like those of the other animals, revealed how love, loss, and care intertwine across time and class.
This project reflected on authorship, representation, and empathy, asking who is seen, named, and cared for within institutional narratives. By personifying the museum as a shelter, The Canvas Shelter subverted the power structure of the traditional art museum, turning observation into emotional participation. The narrative concluded with a personal reflection on Rachel’s own adopted labrador retriever, Kahn, whose story bridges the distance between past and present, painting and life, art and care. Ultimately, The Canvas Shelter invited our first year class to adopt not only the forgotten animals of art history but also a more compassionate way of seeing.
Ali El-Chaer (they/he) created a walk through using the folk story of Joha and his donkey as a guide and to set the tone on cultural appropriation and erasure through the Arab/Islamic art wing. The viewer could use the blank Mary template as a comment on the absence of Palestinian textile/patterns. The use of Mary is also reflective of Ali’s Palestinian Christian background and the importance of her story as a Palestinian woman on a global scale and the Palestinian Christian identity being erased. Viewers were able to dress her up with various other patterns and materials encountered in the same wing and in other places of the museum.
The MET has Palestinian textiles within their collection but they are not on display. This inspired him to ask questions about artifacts you do not see in a museum for this assignment, what happens when you erase a culture or people from history, and who is allowed to be seen.
Corina Coughlan, MFA ‘24 Fellow, Public Policy Lab Developing human-centered design initiatives to improve public services through conducting user research, developing service design strategies, and collaborating with interdisciplinary teams to prototype and test solutions.
The MFA Design transformed my approach to design and research, encouraging me to ask deeper questions, challenge conventions, and use design as a tool for cultural critique. One of the most rewarding aspects was its interdisciplinary nature, which allowed me to collaborate across university departments and integrate diverse perspectives into my research. This process was instrumental in shaping both my voice as a designer and the direction of my practice.
My MFA research stemmed from a desire to challenge how we see, measure, and communicate lived experience and explore how data can become more human and accessible through visual storytelling and immersive experiences. My thesis exhibition translated these ideas into immersive storytelling through sound, video, and text, offering a more embodied way of understanding movement and data.
Sanaz Feizi, MFA ‘23 Assistant Professor, University of Memphis Interdisciplinary designer, educator, and researcher whose practice explores the intersection of socio-cultural, biomedical, and biopolitical frameworks.
What I found most valuable about the program was being part of a supportive and collaborative community where faculty were genuinely invested in each student’s growth. The program fostered an environment of mutual encouragement while ensuring we were equipped with the most current and relevant design knowledge. This combination of academic rigor and community support created a unique learning experience that empowered me to develop my own research and creative practice.
My research investigating menstrual stigma and gender inequality, I developed the MAKE TALK Workshop—a research-driven, participatory methodology that leverages dialogic exchange and creative self-expression to surface and challenge normative narratives surrounding menstruation.
Leona Cheung, MFA ‘23 Freelance Designer Designer and educator based in Los Angeles, working in print and digital projects from branding to websites.
The program allowed us to freely explore many avenues of research relating to our personal interests of study. It was a wonderful experience to develop ideas alongside peers with backgrounds and interests that were diverse, thus creating a rich environment for collaboration. I’m grateful for the support of the faculty, their generosity in sharing knowledge and resources. Not only was it a space to grow my practice and expand the skills for both traditional and contemporary applications of design, but it also taught me how to view things through the lens of greater sensitivity to critical issues.
Sophie Auger, MFA ’21 Visiting Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal Alongside teaching also works independently and in collaboration with artists, curators, and publishers on exhibitions, publications, and websites.
I was part of the inaugural cohort of the MFA in Design program at Rutgers, and one of only two students. This extraordinary context was both challenging and rewarding: the intimacy of the cohort allowed for individualized engagement, while the generous and dedicated faculty and access to great resources at Rutgers made it a very fruitful experience. The program encourages experimentation in design, art, technology, and interdepartmental research; all of which have enriched my interdisciplinary practice.
My research explored the paradox of the NFT, cryptographically unique yet not interchangeable. This coupled with the intangible nature of a new technology still in the making, fed my thesis work and research. The resulting exhibition explored the aesthetic experience of the NFT, as well as its impact on notions of archiving.
Silence, Fear, and Urgency in Design Practice: October 21, 2025
What do I look like to a machine? Computer vision algorithms “see” me as a series of boxes that can be recognized and named, a group of points whose relationship to one another predicts my emotional state, and so on.
A series of self portraits attempts to reclaim my image from this reductive algorithmic gaze, while prompting additional questions: what ways of knowing are illegible to a machine? In what ways do I want to be known, to myself and to others?
On October 21, the Mason Gross Design community welcomed Livia Foldes, a Brooklyn-based cultural worker whose practice explores gender, labor, intimacy, and power across art, design, technology, and activism. Her work asks how and why machines are taught to understand, and often misunderstand, our bodies and the identities they carry. Livia’s projects have been supported by The Photographers’ Gallery, NEW INC, and the Goethe Institut, reflecting her deep commitment to using design as a tool for critical reflection and social change.
In her talk, Livia traced her journey from working in San Francisco during the height of the tech boom—when rapid growth and gentrification transformed the city, to pursuing graduate studies in Design and Technology at Parsons. These experiences grounded her practice in ethics and activism, and led her to question the systems that shape our digital lives.
Livia shared a range of projects that examined bias in machine vision, erased internet histories, and the overlooked contributions of sex workers to digital culture. Through works such as Machine Portraits and Browser Histories, she revealed how technology mirrors structures of power, determining who is visible and who is rendered invisible.
Reflecting on her teaching and creative process, Livia spoke about the need to build design practices that balance urgency and sustainability, to challenge injustice without burning out, and to critique systems while caring for oneself and one’s community.
She closed her lecture with a meditation on fear and silence, reminding students that design exists in tension: between art and commerce, critique and complicity, innovation and responsibility. The real work of design, she suggested, begins when we find the courage to speak, to question, and to act with both empathy and conviction.
On October 7, the Mason Gross Design community welcomed Eli Rosenbloom, designer, editor, and founder of the digital library New Reader, for a thought-provoking lecture exploring the intersections of print, film, and digital media. Eli previously served as art director of the experimental publication Visionaire, and his practice examines how traditional print culture evolves within the landscape of new media. His collaborations include projects with Prada, Burberry, Rizzoli, the Judd Foundation, and the National Museum of Norway.
In his talk, Eli shared a series of works that questioned how publishing and exhibition design can merge into new forms of storytelling. He described publication as a space for experience, where a book might unfold like an exhibition and an exhibition might read like a book. Through restrained visuals and precise sequencing, his work demonstrates how design can contain time, memory, and narrative.
A key reference point in his lecture was the assigned reading The Movie Was About a Movie, which traced how the shift from watching films in theaters to viewing them on VCRs and through video rentals changed our collective relationship with media. Eli connected this transition to his own practice, showing how the formats of media—print, screen, or projection—reshape how we see, collect, and share stories.
By moving between design, editing, and curation, Eli’s work invites us to consider how the mediums we use to store and circulate images influence what we remember and how we tell stories. His lecture reminded the audience that in every format—page, screen, or archive—design is a form of storytelling that keeps visual culture alive.
