News and Events
Learn about the College of Design's latest accomplishments and our signature design events!
Georgia Tech Celebrates Global Development Week
Georgia Tech is celebrating Global Development Week this year with a week-long series of events in connection with the launch of Georgia Tech’s new Master of Science in Global Development, a degree dedicated to educating the next generation of global development leaders.

EarSketch Reaches Milestone One Million Users
Georgia Institute of Technology’s innovative educational platform EarSketch reached a milestone this month—one million users.
The music/coding platform was created at Georgia Tech by School of Music Chair Jason Freeman and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Professor Brian Magerko and is designed to teach students to code in Python or JavaScript through music and creative discovery.
Tzu-Chieh Kurt Hong Wins 2022 ARCC Awards
Tzu-Chieh Kurt Hong has won a 2022 King Medal from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) for his work on the Shape Machine. ARCC awards one King Medal annually to one student per ARCC member institution. Earlier this year, Hong won the 2022 ARCC Dissertation Award for the same work.

Design Grads Voted '40 Under 40'
Mehdi Nourbakhsh Ph.D. BC'16, and Sophia Prater BSID'06, are in the 2022 cohort of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association's list of "40 Under 40".
Prater is the founder and lead UX designer at Rewired and the chief evangelist of Object-Oriented UX. She is the host of the OOUX Happy Hour meetup and the OOUX Podcast. Nourbakhsh is the founder and CEO of YegaTech, a technology consulting company in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. He started YegaTech with the mission of helping AEC professionals and companies grow by curating their data and creating impactful artificial intelligence technologies.

Darren Waller Inspired by Music to Manifest His New Life
Music has always been a big part of Darren Waller’s life. During his time as a Georgia Tech football player and student, Waller learned more about his rich family past in jazz through Assistant Professor Chip Crotts' course.
Waller is the great-grandson of Thomas “Fats” Waller, a charismatic pianist, prolific composer, and the first Black man to write the score for a Broadway musical. Music runs through his veins, and even now as an NFL player with the Raiders, music continues to be positive and creative outlet for him.
Recovering History with Digital Design
School of Architecture Assistant Professor Danielle Willkens can do amazing things with digital architecture reconstructions, including taking people back to Selma, Alabama in 1965.
A Georgia Tech team exhibit, which won a People’s Choice Award while on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently, will be on display in the School of Architecture. Willkens leads the team of student researchers who created the exhibit.

A Local Perspective, Globally Realized
School of Architecture students recently explored one of the world’s rarest ecosystems to study how architecture can simultaneously protect the environment and elevate human community.
As the habitat of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda grows, farmers are being displaced. Georgia Tech student architects met with relocated communities, visited the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, and presented designs for model communities to house the relocated people.
Students Touch the Future of Music at Guthman Competition
For Georgia Tech's music technology majors, the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition represents the pinnacle event of their creative study and research. Students help produce the concert, exhibit their work, and learn from the judges and competitors. They even get to play the instruments!
GIS Study Reveals: Poorly-built Cities Strain Romance
Clio Andris and her team use maps to study how relationships are situated in cities: whether people live near each other, whether it is easy for them to see each other, and what kinds of activities and amenities they can easily access.
She recently realized city layouts (where the buildings are, how public transportation works, even where sidewalks are placed) affect romantic couples.

Georgia Tech Plans Tokyo Redesign Using Social Data
Students in the Tokyo Smart City studio, of the Eco Urban Lab, are changing the way we plan cities. Using machine learning techniques on data from smartphones, GPS, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, students develop proposals based on measured human experience.
FOREST
A Robot and Human Experience
FOREST is the performative outcome of an NSF-funded project aimed at enhancing trust between humans and robots through sound and gesture.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that embedding emotion-driven sounds and gestures in robotic arms help establish trust and likability between humans and their AI counterparts.

Industrial Design Faculty Explain Holiday Product Design
As much as consumers felt the effects of supply chain backlogs during this year’s holiday season, industrial designers and entire holiday merchandise teams are dealing with them, too. Three School of Industrial Design faculty join colleagues from the Scheller College of Business to explain how seasonal products are made and the results of a holiday product design cycle challenged by a pandemic and resulting complications.

Flourishing Communities Collaborative Wins PIT-UN Grant
Julie Kim, associate chair for the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, is committed to empower entire communities through design thinking and technology.
For several months, Kim, her fellow faculty, and their undergraduate and graduate students have leveraged Georgia Tech resources to address critical problems in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhood.
“That’s why this grant is so special,” Kim said. “We’re working hand in hand with the community. We’re providing them with specific tools that allow them to understand how to use design thinking to solve their problems.”
Photo: Monica Rizk, M Arch 2022
Design Faculty on Two NSF Civic Innovation Challenge Awards
Two of the 17 NSF Civic Innovation Challenge Awards (narrowed down from 52), include College of Design faculty. Their interdisciplinary work provides community-based solutions to mobility issues and disaster resilience.
Subhro Guhathakurta and Kari Watkins are on the Piloting On-Demand Multimodal Transit in Atlanta project. This project aims to synchronize on-demand shuttle services with Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) services and real-time feeds, and deploy these services in targeted transit deserts. Nisha Botchwey is on the Visualizing Resilience: BIPOC Youth Advocacy Through Mapmaking project. This project will deliver a curriculum to support youth advocacy for infrastructure projects in their communities.
New School Chairs Announced

New Master of Science in Urban Analytics Launches Fall 2021
The Georgia Tech College of Design is proud to announce its newest interdisciplinary degree, the Master of Science in Urban Analytics (MSUA). The School of City and Regional Planning will administer the degree in partnership with the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), and School of Interactive Computing (IC).
Recent College Work
Our faculty publish their research and academic advancement to several professional journals, as well as to SmarTech, the Georgia Tech library’s repository for Institute intellectual property. Use the links below to experience some of our most recent work!
- “What Could Go Wrong?” Buntrock, Dana
- “BIM-enabled facilities operation and maintenance: A review” Pishdad-Bozorgi, Pardis
- “Sustainable and Resilient Urban Water Systems: The Role of Decentralization and Planning” Leigh, Nancey Green
- “Instrument Activity Detection in Polyphonic Music Using Deep Neural Networks” Gururani, Siddharth and Lerch, Alexander