It’s what they do, whether they’re making new tools for detecting radiation or building companies to support cancer research.

But not every NC State student debuts his or her creations to an audience of adoring peers and potential business partners. That’s the experience at Art2Wear, the annual show of fashions from students in the College of Design and the College of Textiles. Part of NC State Fashion Week, Art2Wear showcased 10 student designers’ work on April 25.

The show gave students rare exposure, said runway show director Lauren Caddick, a junior art and design major.

“They really do get their name out there as an emerging designer in front of industry professionals who attend the show,” she said. “It’s an experience to see what it’s actually like in the real world to design for a large-scale event.”

The theme for Art2Wear 2013 was Hypernatural. Designers focused on amplifying and manipulating elements of nature in conceiving their collections. The results included collections based on celestial objects, camouflage and concealment, fractals and naturally occurring patterns, and materials found in dumpsters.

“It’s the idea of taking something that’s found in nature … and augmenting some part of it to make some big extravagant idea,” said Caddick, who is a Park Scholar.

After four years in Reynolds Coliseum, Art2Wear returned to the Court of North Carolina this year. New faculty advisors Katherine Diuguid and Justin LeBlanc saw the move outdoors as a way of refreshing the event. The outdoor venue was only the most visible change for Art2Wear. Diuguid and LeBlanc took over as advisors this year after the retirement of longtime advisor Vita Plume in 2012.

“Both of us remember the excitement of it being outside and how utterly beautiful it was,” Diuguid said. She and LeBlanc, now assistant professors of art and design, both designed collections for Art2Wear as undergraduates.

Open video in YouTube | Transcript | Video from NC State YouTube

Organizers also opened the event up a bit this year, welcoming students from other colleges to participate. Nick Szerszen, a senior studying business in the Poole College of Management, was the fundraising chair. A new fundraiser event preceded Art2Wear: Stomp The Heels, a January race where runners sprang down Hillsborough Street in high heels. Winners received tickets to the men’s home basketball game against UNC-Chapel Hill. Some of the race proceeds went to Arts for Life, a nonprofit organization that helps children with serious illness express themselves through art.

“It comes to a point when you realize you can be more than just a fashion show and more than just something exciting,” Caddick said. “You can actually do something that gives back.”

During the spring semester, students studying industrial design, graphic design and computer game development got the chance to work together designing a video game on a prototype of the 21-foot-wide, high-definition video wall that will be the centerpiece of the library’s game lab.

The Serious Side of Gaming

The students learned to research the needs of a client, orchestrate the work of a team of designers and engineers, and complete a project on a tight deadline. They scoped, planned and delivered NOL, a collaborative pursuit video game designed to use real-time data from the library’s database to allow players to work together to guard the Vault of Knowledge, a mystical storage site holding the collected wisdom and secrets gained from the innate human capacity for curiosity and thirst for understanding.

Michael Young, associate professor of computer science, said the vast visual real estate provided by the Christie MicroTiles screen encouraged the students to develop a game more adapted to large groups than the typical computer game. They even combined two motion-sensing devices to double the number of players connected to the system.

‘We Can’t Wait’

“We can’t wait for the Hunt Library to open so we can further bolster our program by using the whole ecosystem of visualization spaces in the building,” he said.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing during the semester. The design students had to resolve dilemmas involving the large aspect ratios and wide camera angles inherent in the giant video wall. They were also consulted by library staff designing the user experience for the game lab in particular and library in general.

“This is fundamental to the work of a great designer,” said Tim Buie, assistant professor of industrial design. “A new technology comes along and the best designers find productive and creative ways to use it. Our students have now had an immersive experience earning their wings on a new technology.”

Seeing the game run for the first time on the Christie MicroTiles screen, one student summed up the experience of the semester: “This is epic.”

The Hunt Library, designed to be nothing less than the best learning and collaborative space in the country, is scheduled to open in January.

In its 11th year, the event gave 18 student designers a showcase for transformational creations. Models wore dresses made of balloons, toilet paper, seashells, maps and other unconventional elements.

“There’s a heavy emphasis on experimental materials even though these come out to be garments,” said Charles Joyner, professor of art and design. “And on the runway sitting some 50 feet, 75 feet, 100 yards away, you don’t see that, you don’t get the fact of all the intricate handwork that’s gone on.”

Art2Wear began in a design student’s room more than a decade ago. As its popularity grew, it moved to a courtyard outside Kamphoefner Hall and the Court of North Carolina before settling at Reynolds.

Veronica Tibbitts, a senior in design and textiles, participated in her third Art2Wear Tuesday. Her first two go-rounds — highlighted by dresses made of roadkill and metal air filters — sparked an addiction, she said. This year, Tibbitts worked beeswax, animal bones and rose petals into designs inspired by human rituals: first love, coming of age and sacrifice.

“I think it was sort of a retrospective of my life to this point because I’m graduating and I’m thinking about the major rites that I’ve passed through up until this point,” she said.

See designs from Tibbitts and her fellow designers:

But the avatars he works on these days are anything but fun and games. Buie and other researchers are working on techniques to help forensic scientists virtually recreate a crime scene in 3-D. The system would then allow investigators from different locations to enter the virtual crime scene, complete with tagged evidence, without leaving their offices.

“It will allow investigators from around the country—or around the world—to collaborate and discuss a crime scene in real time,” says Buie, who is working with R. Michael Young, associate professor of engineering.

Here’s how it works: Crime scene investigators, who usually document a scene by taking photographs and writing reports, would bring a 3-D laser scanner that can pick up every data point in the room. The data are then digitized and imported into the program, creating a high-fidelity recreation of the scene.

“It’s a tool trying to bring crime scene investigation into the virtual reality and video game world of the twenty-first century,” says Young. Young said he was surprised to learn that detectives often don’t visit the crime scene, often working instead off photographs and reports. But the tool allows detectives to bring up a scene and look at it in a hologram display. “They can even jump in it and move around,” Young says.

Buie, who works on the visual side of the project, can create avatars to match the height and build of a real witness, perpetrator or victim—he even made one to match an investigator visiting from Fayetteville, N.C. Once in place, the avatars can help investigators re-enact a crime, or check out a witness’ story to see what the witness could have observed from a particular vantage point.

The work, funded by a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Cyber- Enabled Discovery and Innovation program, is similar to designing a video game, Buie says. “The tools we use are professional-level tools; the workflow is very similar,” he says. “It’s the content that is a little bit different.”

It may sound like the premise of a horror movie, but it’s actually an excellent scientific question. What sort of wild life lives all around us, every day? To date, little research has been done on the microscopic bacteria, fungi and other organisms that share our homes. But Rob Dunn, an associate professor of biology at NC State, is trying to change that.

Rob Dunn, associate professor of biology at NC State

Dunn is the driving force behind the “Wild Life of Your Home” project, which is asking volunteers from around the country to take swabs of dust from different areas around the house and send them in. Researchers will then use high-throughput genetic sequencing technology to determine exactly which species are found in each home.

“We aim to understand, for the first time, how the ways in which we live influence who we live with,” Dunn says. “For example, to what extent do the species around us, particularly those microscopic species we aren’t even aware of, differ as a consequence of how we live?”

To address that question, Dunn’s project is not only seeking volunteers from every state – but from people that live in very different environments. For example, the project hopes to get samples from rural farmhouses as well as big-city apartments.

By shedding light on our inconspicuous houseguests, Dunn hopes to advance our understanding of how human behavior has impacted the evolution of our own ecosystems. After all, it may just be a living room to us, but it is the entire world for countless generations of our microscopic neighbors.

“Some of these species are probably scary,” Dunn says. “And many are absolutely necessary to our well-being. But we can’t begin to understand the big picture until we know what’s out there.”

You can learn more about the project, which is funded largely by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, here.

In that constantly shifting environment, the opportunity to make a tangible, permanent impact can be rare. Such an opportunity has presented itself to students in NC State’s landscape architecture program, and they have made the most of it.

Over the last two years, Andrew Fox, assistant professor of landscape architecture in the College of Design, and his Landscape Architecture 500 class have remade areas around Syme and Turlington halls. They’ve done it by designing and executing landscape projects that are both beautiful and manage stormwater runoff around the Central Campus residence halls.

The Artist's Backyard at Turlington

Working with University Housing, Fox’s students designed and installed a rain garden outside Syme Hall in May 2010. After the success of that project, the class and Housing partnered to design a five-year plan for similar efforts elsewhere. Fox’s spring and summer 2011 classes undertook the first of those projects: the Artist’s Backyard, a “pocket park” between Turlington and Owen halls.

The students crafted the master plan during the spring semester and spent the first five weeks of summer school planning and researching. That led to a five-week sprint to build the first phase of the Artist’s Backyard, starting in July. The 18 students often put in 10- or 12-hour days paving, planting and installing benches, Fox said.

For many of the students, the Artist’s Backyard was their first experience shepherding a landscape design from conception to completion, said Jacqui Harris and Caroline Tilley, who were in the class. The project gave them valuable real-world experience.

The Syme Rain Garden

“We did some things that I hadn’t done previously,” said Harris, who is on track to graduate with a master’s of landscape architecture (MLA) in May 2012. “So, now I can think about concrete in a different way, and I can think about metal in a different way. I can use different materials that I maybe wouldn’t have been able to use before.”

Tilley said she learned about overcoming unexpected obstacles while working on the project. Earlier this semester, for instance, she had to rethink the runnels – metal channels that guide runoff underneath drainage grates – after a truck ran over a grate and did serious damage to it. New runnels, better suited to bear weight, should be installed soon.

“As students and potential hirees, we’ll have a little more credibility, I think, having this background,” said Tilley, who also plans to graduate with an MLA next May.

Future phases of the project will expand the Artist’s Backyard and add gardens next to Owen Hall, which is adjacent to Turlington. As with the Syme and Turlington projects, the goal is to use low-impact design principles to build ecologically friendly, attractive common areas around the dormitories, Fox said.

The project meets three prongs of the university’s mission, Fox said: education, outreach and, eventually, research. The Artist’s Backyard should provide opportunities to study stormwater movement in an urban setting, Fox said.

The joint effort with University Housing also allows the students to leave their footprint on campus. Fox said the possibility of leaving a legacy was a major motivator for the class.

“When you’ve been a part of this and you’ve done so well, no one can take it away from you,” Fox said.

The university has benefitted, too, said Tim Luckadoo, associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs.

“It really fits in with what we want to do in terms of living and learning,” he said. “We want our students who live on campus to learn in and explore their surroundings.”

But it’s not too big for the latest project by a trio of rising seniors studying art and design at NC State. For a little more than two weeks, their 15-panel installation has adorned two sides of a two-year-old parking deck at the corner of McDowell and Davie streets in downtown Raleigh.

In April, work crews hung the first of the 15 panels comprising "The Amazing Sky Race."

Jordan Deva, Joe Lawson and Justin Phillips – The Balloon Boys, as they’ve dubbed themselves – designed the banners this past spring. They were selected from among several teams that participated in contest to make the parking deck, owned by Empire Properties, more attractive. NC State Art + Design Professor Charles Joyner, Associate Professor Pat Fitzgerald and Assistant Professor McArthur Freeman led the process.

Over several whirlwind weeks, Deva, Lawson and Phillips married two concepts to create “The Fantastic Sky Race” while also keeping up with their own coursework.

“I don’t think I’ve stayed up so many nights in a row before,” Lawson said. “But it was worth it. It’s the biggest canvas of my life.”

“The Fantastic Sky Race” runs from a cool, blue-hued coastal environment through temperate, grassy landscapes and a pair of arctic vistas. The final stages move to warmer climates: arid desert, grassland and a cloud city, rendered in orange, pink and purple shades. The colors of a sunset inspired the design of the finishing panels, Phillips said.

Workers finished installing the banners in mid-July.

The cast of race participants includes a polar bear, a dragon, a whale and, far from first place, a man in an easy chair carried by a flock of birds.

“We wanted to create something that any age can appreciate,” Lawson said.

Included in the installation are roughly a dozen references to Raleigh, Wake County and the state of North Carolina. Wake County Libraries will invite residents to submit stories inspired by “The Fantastic Sky Race” and distribute coloring books and bookmarks based on it.

An official unveiling for the banners will be part of First Friday events downtown on Aug. 5. It’s not clear how long the 60-foot-by-21-foot banners will stay in place. Regardless of when it comes down, seeing 20,000 square feet of their art on display is something the artists won’t soon forget.

“This has definitely been a unique experience that I would not have experienced without the university,” Phillips said.

The Fantastic Sky Race Photo Gallery