MFA Design First-Year reviews

On December 8, 2025 the MFA Design first year candidates held their semester review, focused on projects completed in Design Studio 1 taught by Sue Huang. The goal of this review was for candidates to receive feedback from design faculty on their chosen project.

Qing Zeng (she/her)

LUNE is a third person 3D narrative game that explores how individuals with social anxiety disorder (S.A.D.) can learn, practice, and internalize social coping strategies through game play, and how these learned strategies may help them regulate emotions and navigate real-world social interactions.

Developed in Unreal Engine 5, the game combines interactive mechanics, environmental storytelling, and character-driven encourates to simulate moments of social tension, uncertainty, and emotional overload. Players engage with others through systems such as color -based resonances, gradual trust building, and keyword collection, which was inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy (C.B.T.) and exposure based coping techniques.

The visual assets were partially created in blender, with emphasis on symbolic character design and atmospheric environments that externalize internal emotional states. Rather than positioning S.A.D. as something to be “fixed,” LUNE frames it as as ongoing process of adaptation, learning, and self acceptance, using play as a low pressure space for emotional rehearsal and reflection.

Jung A Huh (she/her)

The Leisure Archive explores how notions of leisure have shifted from the Joseon Dynasty to the digital age by re-imagining historical figures through contemporary technologies. Using digital embroidery, A. I. image generation, A-Frame, and V.R., the work bridges past and future forms of leisure, questing how humans experience rest, play, and imagination across time.

The project combines handcrafted textures with virtual environments to create a hybrid space where embroidered bodies and digital worlds coexist. Through this process it reflects on the evolving relationship between human senses, craft, and machine-mediated experiences.

Ali El-Chaer (they/he)

Ali El-Chaer completed a short form publication, Tomorrow’s Grief, that compiled text, news articles, and posters about Palestine and Lebanon from 1982 to 2025. This publication was designed using Adobe InDesign. The intention was to collect and distribute the political posters and stories from or on the topic of Palestine and Lebanon as a way questioning our responsibility to people now.

Furthermore, El-Chaer held the goal of understanding dialectical materialism or historic materialism, as a means to understand the superstructures that distract us from real change and show opposition to the economic systems that continue to suffocate freedom. And perhaps by changing the future through new technologies and material change rather than by ideas alone, this remembered historical materialism and knowledge will inform us on how to change the nature of the past as well.  

MFA Design Second-Year reviews

December 4, 2025

On December 4th, the MFA Design second-year students held their semester review, focused on clarifying and strengthening the direction of their thesis projects ahead of the January–February exhibition period.

The goal of this review was to solidify and refine the aims and specifics of each thesis project, with particular attention to human interaction, physical presence, and exhibition display. Students were asked to present a proof of concept, prototype, mock-up, or work-in-progress at real scale. Rather than showing a complete thesis, the review emphasized testing how an audience might experience and engage with a portion of the work.

Chiyu Zheng

Presence invites participants to interact with an installation through full-body gestures rather than handheld devices. The project responds to how screen-based technologies train bodies to shrink into small, constrained postures. By asking participants to occupy space with their whole bodies, the work reframes technology as something expansive and physically engaging, restoring a sense of scale and presence often lost in digital interaction.

Peyton Chiang

Peyton ’s thesis explores the relationship between corporeal beings and ancestral beings, examining how memory, ritual, and lineage move through physical form. His work draws from ancestral practices and material culture, translating them into sculptural and spatial experiments. Through layered structures and translucent materials, the project investigates how bodies act as vessels for inherited knowledge, belief, and presence. The work-in-progress installation presented at the review focused on scale, verticality, and atmosphere, offering a prototype for how audiences might physically encounter and move around these ancestral narratives.

Anukriti Kaushik

Anukriti’s project explores fertility figurines from the Indus Valley Civilization and how they shifted from everyday objects into museum artifacts. Working with archival material like excavation photos, maps, receipts, and letters, she looks at how repetition, documentation, and displacement change an object’s meaning. Through repeated sculptural reproductions, the figurines slowly transform again, breaking, mutating, and taking on new identities beyond their original role as symbols of fertility.

Yuxuan Hu

This digital art project transforms live sound into visual form using real-time interaction. Audience members speak into a microphone, and their voices are translated into dynamic visual particles that slowly fade over time. Each interaction produces a unique, temporary visual result, emphasizing ephemerality, participation, and the physical presence of sound.

Asem Kiyalova

This project challenges the Western calendar’s linear, productivity-driven structure of time. By questioning how time is measured and organized, the work invites audiences to imagine alternative, shared, and more intuitive ways of marking life. The calendar becomes a speculative space for rethinking planning, value, and connection beyond capitalist frameworks.

Mahsa Masoumi

Sabr explores patience as a transformative force through storytelling with Persian carpet motifs. Anchored in the Persian epic of Zaal and Simorgh, the project weaves cultural symbolism, material practice, and narrative into a contemporary design context. The work examines how time, care, and repetition shape both stories and objects.

Art & Design Department and MFA in Design Program at the Climate Symposium at Rutgers-New Brunswick

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.

Design Lecture Series: Burak Arikan

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 Research Methods visit to the MET

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.

MFA Design alumni reflect

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.


 
 

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