Open Design Jury

Core77 Design Awards 2017

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  Dan Chen

  Engineer & Designer

  Dan Chen is a designer and engineer. He communicates his ideas through working prototypes, investigating new ways of approaching user interactions.
  
  He has several degrees including a MAS from MIT, an MFA in digital media from RISD and a BFA in communication design from UConn. He has over 8 years of design experience and now works at Culture Robotics as senior engineer. Previous positions include MIT Lifelong Kindergarten as an industrial designer. Johnson & Johnson as Senior Interaction Designer. Senior Interaction Designer at IDEO.
  
  His personal work has been featured in CNET, The Huffington Post, the verge, Engadget, Mashable and Daily Mail. Dan was invited as a speaker at TEDx Vienna on the future of intimacy in 2016. His work was exhibited in Vitra Design Museum, MAK Wien, Design Museum Gent & Ars Electronica.
  
  Working in the realms of robotics, communication design, interaction design and product design, Dan explores the new ways of communication and human experience through working prototypes and storytelling, inviting a reflective evaluation and implication.

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  Brian Kane

  Professor, RISD

  Brian Kane was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1965 and currently lives and works in Cambridge, MA. He received a BFA in Painting from RISD in 1987, where he also teaches. His sculpture, interactive, and video work has shown in many museum and gallery exhibitions, and Kane’s pioneering real time video sampling techniques was influential to a generation of media artists. He was a founding member of the video art group EBN, and a primary collaborator with RadioValve.com and Amorphic Robot Works.
  
  Recent exhibitions and festivals include Nuit Blanche (Toronto), MACBA (Barcelona), HDADD+ (MFA Boston), #11.Art (Museo Nacional do Complexo Cultural da Republica, Brazil), Memery (MASS MoCA), People in Space (Shanghai World Expo), Late at Tate (Tate Britain), Big Chill (U.K.), MediaLive (Boulder MoCA), and a 2010 solo show at Murphy and Dine, New York, NY. His latest work "Healing Tool" is a disappearing billboard, and can be see here: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/exclusive-photos-billboards-make-interstates-into-art-galleries

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  James Coleman

  Research and Development Engineer, A. Zahner Company

  James Coleman currently acts as a Research and Development Engineer at A. Zahner Company. He is involved in projects as a digital design and manufacturing specialist. James holds master’s degrees in architecture and mechanical engineering from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He couples his architectural and mechanical engineering education with an expertise in parametric design-to-fabrication methodologies.
  
  James has presented and taught widely at events including the NYC AIA Center for Architecture’s Technology Lecture Series, OReilly Solid: Software/ Hardware/ Everywhere, ACM SIGGRAPH 2015, as an MIT Teaching and Research Fellow, Singapore University of Technology and Design studio instructor,FAB11 Boston workshop lead and more. It is up for debate whether he holds the record at MIT for acting as Teaching Assistant for the most classes over a 4-year period (14). He is also a long time contributor to the infamous MIT course How to Make Almost Anything and Fab Academy taught by Neil Gershenfeld.
  
  He has worked internationally as design engineer for architectural projects of a variety of scales and also as a Product Development Engineer at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. James deploys a diverse set of fabrication equipment, industrial robots, and custom made machinery with which he makes things, breaks things, and invents things with varying levels of success and sophistication.

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  Jifei Ou

  Designer

  Jifei Ou (欧冀飞) is a designer, researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, where he focuses on designing and fabricating transformable materials across scales (from μm to m). Physical materials are usually considered as static, passive, and permanent. Jifei is interested in finding ways to redesign physical materials with the characteristics of digital information, such as the ability to change shape and and to be programmable. Such new materials could be used to construct a responsive living environment, accelerate the process of design and manufacturing, and enhance our existing interaction with products. As much as his work is informed by digital technology, he is inspired in equal measure by the natural world around him. He has been leading projects that study bio-mimicry and bio-derived materials to design shape-changing packaging, garments and furniture.
  
  Jifei holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab and a Diplom in Design from the Offenbach University of Art and Design in Germany.

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  Nadya Peek

  Designer, MIT

  Nadya Peek is a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, a group at the intersection of the physical and the digital. Nadya Peek works on unconventional digital fabrication tools, small scale automation, networked control systems, and advanced manufacturing, and is currently teaching the MIT class How to make something that makes (almost) anything. Nadya Peek is an active member of the global fablab community, working on making digital fabrication more accessible with better CAD/CAM tools and developing open source (hardware) machines and control systems. Previously, Nadya Peek was an editor at Mediamatic in Amsterdam.