Cathy Tung's thesis, Well-rounded: Using Art to Enhance Interdisciplinary Learning, sheds light on the potential of art-integrated education to promote the development of hard and soft skills in children. Cathy highlights that traditional education, confined within classroom walls, can be mundane and unstimulating for children to engage with. Conversely, incorporating resources from art museums as a location-based learning tool can provide an interactive and engaging experience that presents opportunities for interdisciplinary learning. This approach can also address the budgetary constraints public schools face in providing adequate art education, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated budget cuts.

Think about the last time you took a rapid COVID-19 home test. Every brand has a different protocol, instructions can often be confusing, results can be unclear, and the amount of wasteful packaging is truly excessive. The Fifteen Home Kit —getting its name from the familiar waiting period interval—is an all-in-one solution with easy-to-follow steps that fits seamlessly in a purse or back pocket.

New York City has seen a tremendous increase in bike sharing—with 1.6 million New Yorkers regularly riding a Citi Bike. But while this increase in popularity has many benefits, it also means more accidents. Bicycle helmets can prevent serious head injuries by 85%, yet 88% of Citi Bike riders choose not to wear helmets. Halo is a helmet-renting service—a convenient and hassle-free way to access protective headgear in NYC. 

The ORA cup and applicator is a self-care product duo for young teenagers to alleviate the intimidation of folding and inserting menstrual cups. On a mission to create eco-friendly, high-performance products, second-year students Nihaarika Arora, Cheryl Zhang, and Xinyue Wu designed ORA during the Product, Brand, and Experience course taught by Hlynur Atlasson.

Trace is an intuitive and thoughtful oral hygiene tool designed to elevate your overall dental wellness experience. Four minutes (the recommended brushing time) many not seem very long, and yet many of us still struggle to dedicate those minutes to our daily dental care routine. Why? Because of its high effort and low reward nature, dental care feels like a task. The current products in the market offerings don’t help either. The industry is hyper-focused on adding high-tech whitening and brightening innovations, rather than focusing on the user’s experience and healthy basics.

Margarita Zulueta's upcoming thesis, Accepting Fat, proposes fat acceptance through design offerings to combat anti-fat bias. Specifically, her project Flex—a speculative new fleet incorporated into Southwest Airlines—addresses discrimination in airplane systems through the lens of seating.

In an 11-week project, Margarita Zulueta, Zekun Yang, and Anne Keating set out to redesign in-home water filtration consumer products, of which Brita is the current market leader. Their solution? VODA—a reusable pitcher-agnostic system that pairs with a geo-specific custom water filtration mixture. VODA focuses on local, open-source accessibility to clean water, and aims to reduce plastic usage in our personal drinking water habits.

“With consistent long-duration spaceflight becoming more probable in humanity’s future,” offers first-year student Corey McClelland, “the opportunities for innovation in microgravity gastronomy are seemingly limitless.