CAS CONNECT 2016

“We looked at what we are as a land- grant inst i tut ion and saw that what dist inguishes us from purely f ine arts schools is a spectrum of science and knowledge they don’t have.” — Pouya Jahanshahi 18 “I had to convince my parents, who had sent me across the ocean at great expen- diture, that a career in the arts and design had a future,” Jahanshahi says. He eventually moved on to obtain his master’s degree with a focus on motion and semiotics, at California State University, Fullerton, where he was intro- duced to the first Macintosh computers. Jahanshahi still keeps one of the relics in his office at OSU. That degree led to work with advertising and design compa- nies, but something was missing. Twenty years after leaving Iran, he returned and came face-to-face with his ethnic visual culture — the missing piece. He pursued his MFA at California Institute for the Arts, keen to develop a hybrid visual identity for his personal graphic voice. Jahanshahi credits a class called “Image Making” that involved picking a designer and trying to make things like that designer for taking him out of his “safe space” and pushing him to truly define who he was. “That’s what I needed to do the whole time,” he says. “It brought out the Iranian in me and the immigrant in me, the hybrid visual thinker. It was about both finding my identity and allowing myself to fail to find something new out of that.” Choo also sees success coming from taking risks. Like Jahanshahi, Choo found work as a professional designer immediately after graduating from college but felt there was more to know. He decided to study in the U.S. and found a home at Iowa State University. It was not an easy transition for he could read and translate English but speaking the language had not been part of his education. He soon found his American classmates were happy to help him practice his English. He enjoyed researching interaction design, which had just begun to be studied at the time, and especially took to leading a classroom. “I didn’t know I could teach until I had an opportunity,” he says. “Since then it’s become a career, and that’s been 14 years now.” Bocanegra never had Choo for a teacher as an undergraduate, but he got to know the professor through an intern- ship with SST Software in Stillwater. Choo pushed the soon-to-be graduate to apply. “He mentioned the MFA program to me and I was fascinated by it,” Bocanegra says. The department, under the guidance of Rebecca Brienen (who also serves as the director for OSU’s School of Visual and Performing Arts), is justifying such enthu- siasm with cutting-edge equipment such as eye-tracker technology, laser cutters, and 3D printers. The department also offers unique opportunities for interdisci- plinary collaboration with entities across campus such as the App Center, engineer- ing, broadcast journalism, and fashion Mar io Bocanegra created this poster for his senior capstone graphic design project at OSU.