Ian E
- Research Program Mentor
MArch candidate at Harvard University
Expertise
Architecture, Fashion, Product Design, Industrial Design, Augemented Reality, Virtual Reality, Extended Reality
Bio
Ian grew up in Bay Area and attended Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, CA. He received a B.A. in Architecture and a Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley, where he was awarded the Departmental Citation in Architecture as the most distinguished graduating student. While at Berkeley, he was a member of the inaugural cohort of the Fung Fellowship, an interdisciplinary initiative that applied design thinking and engineering savvy to solve public health problems. Through the fellowship, he partnered with Blockchain and VR companies to re-imagine the future of mobility and health education. After undergrad, he worked in San Francisco for an architecture office designing affordable housing while also serving as a member of the Curatorial Team of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Currently, he is a Dean’s Merit Scholar pursuing a Master of Architecture (M.Arch I) degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is the founding editor of DISC, a journal that explores the entanglements between architecture, media, and technology. He also works as a research assistant in various labs at MIT, investigating new AR/VR/XR applications. Throughout his education, he has maintained an interest in the intersection between architecture and fashion as two different scales of sheltering the body. He has explored this most recently by guest editing an issue of Paprika, a Yale student architecture journal, on the future of fashion.Project ideas
Design a new building for your city!
What challenges does your city face? Housing, healthcare, gentrification, public policy, recreation, racism, education, technology, design, climate change? Many of these concerns are integrally related to architecture and can either be worsened or improved by the buildings and the infrastructure that surrounds you. In this project, you will use your own immediate surroundings as a way of investigating the unique challenges faced by your area both now and in the future. The process of identifying these problems will help improve your skills in research, critical design thinking, and futurist speculation. Perhaps most importantly, this project will force you to formulate a tight “how might we” research question that strictly defines the scope of your work and interests. This determining question will then be paired with a desired project outcome that directly addresses the question. In this second phase, your initial research will be deployed towards a specific format of outcome that will give you the opportunity to learn new hard skills such as 3d software design, Augmented reality filter creation, speculative mapping, or academic writing. For example: How might a new city bill address the effects of climate change in our downtown? Outcome: Research paper + public policy proposal How might a new STEM building in our high school improve students’ technical literacy? Outcome: Building design in 3d software How might we improve public awareness of the architectural legacies of racism in our city through social media? Outcome: Instagram AR filter How might we visualize the economic and population shifts happening in our county to better plan for new development? Outcome: Speculative Map