Pratt researchers can form collaborative partnerships through a number of different structures. Our Provost’s Centers and the IDC Research Accelerator Hub conduct impactful research in many disciplines, from nurturing new artists and designers, to responding to climate change, to catalyzing affordable housing development and stimulating job creation.
Each research group may have a space at the Research Yard, where collaborations and partnerships can grow and evolve. The IDC Research Accelerators turn early ideas into real world impact. We provide a supportive environment for research projects to grow, so that researchers can develop them into business start-ups, School Centers, Provost’s Centers, and more.
Provost’s Centers
The IDC Research Accelerator Hub
Supported by the , the IDC Research Accelerators take early-stage research and support their growth and development, as they pursue further funding, product realization, or prototyping studies. Housed at the Research Yard, Accelerators can share ideas, access support and resources, and grow their research into business start-ups, School or Provost’s Centers, or, we can help them to imagine and realize a different path that matches their ambition.
Sai Shruthi Chivukula, School of Information
Translate Research Group
The Translate Research Group aims to delve into the ethical and regulatory dimensions of technology and design practices and education. Their work focuses on understanding practitioners’ and students’ ethical awareness, the complexity of ethical issues, ethical actions, and responsibilities in their everyday design work. They translate these investigations into practical resources, actionable tools, and methods to support value-focused decision-making and ethical reflection. Recent methods designed by the research group are to expose manipulative and value-centered designer intentions, and to develop ethical argumentation skills in design classrooms. Translate conducts research across these three broad areas: Ethics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Design Practice, Tech Regulation and Policy, and Design (Ethics) Pedagogy and Methods.
Mariel Collard Arias, School of Architecture
Land Skills Workshop
The Land Skills Workshop cultivates land-based skills and landscape competence among designers. From an anticolonial perspective, it engages landscape practices, materials, tools, and technologies—often ancestral—as living knowledge systems that can unsettle the present and reorient the future.
Yuliya Dzyuban, School of Architecture
Collective Cool CIties Lab
Collective Cool CIties Lab supports community-led urban heat solutions through neighborhood-level participatory microclimate assessments that center diverse lived experiences.
Craig Fahner, School of Information
Alternative Social Media Research
This research employs creative code and scraping tools to develop “parasitic platforms,” empowering users to challenge algorithmic recommendation systems and regain agency over social feeds.
Understanding and Regulating Surveillance and AI
This project deconstructs proprietary facial recognition technologies by training open-source models, making opaque algorithmic training processes legible to inform policy, public understanding, and regulatory frameworks.
Pen Plotter Visualization Research
This initiative develops open-source software, such as p5.plotterControl, driving physical pen plotters to generate installation-scale data visualizations that dynamically transform in response to live inputs.
Brooke Garner, School of Design
Vessels: Garment Repair as Intergenerational Storytelling
Vessels: Garment Repair as Intergenerational Storytelling investigates clothing repair as a collaborative practice of care, grief processing, and intergenerational memory. Through reflective interviews and hands-on reworking, participants mend ancestral garments to honor personal histories. Framing textile repair as an ethical ritual rather than mere technical restoration, the research challenges disposable fashion systems. The accompanying installation presents reconstructed garments, process documentation, and recorded participant narratives to demonstrate repair as an enduring model of material stewardship.
Deborah Johnson, Foundation
HND/SGL
HND/SGL is a hybrid multimedia research and installation project examining the human hand as an instrument of labor, communication, and intergenerational transmission among women. Integrating observational and devotional drawing, photolithography, spline-based symbolic forms, graphic notation, string figures, volumetric capture, and recursive and responsive coding, the project investigates how embodied knowledge, artistic authorship, care, mentorship, rivalry, legacy, friction, and erasure are cast and circulated through collaboration. Using actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr’s frequency-hopping co-invention as a conceptual framework for transmission, interference, and shifting signals, the research develops a series of experimental machines that translate these invisible relational systems into choreographed physical, visual, and responsive forms. Each machine becomes an embodied record of a particular collaboration, capable of transforming, failing, and carrying traces forward into subsequent machines.
Whitney Laemmli, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Science, Technology, and the Quantified Body
Science, Technology, and the Quantified Body explores how novel technologies and scientific practices for measuring and controlling the human body have shaped the world in which we live. Though states, scientists, artists, and engineers have long observed and gathered information about the human body, in recent years, such data has been collected in far greater volumes and utilized and represented in new ways. Facial recognition systems transform human physiognomy into strings of 0s and 1s, wearable fitness trackers create digital portraits of motion and stillness, robots perform Japanese folk dances, and humanoid avatars populate video games, concert performances, and virtual conference rooms.
These contemporary practices, however, are not entirely new, and this research accelerator will situate them in a broader historical, political, and ethical context. Examining tools ranging from biofeedback systems to dance notation, it will trace the ways in which everything from factory labor to the treatment of trauma to art and design to fundamental ideas about the self have both changed alongside and shaped these evolving technologies.
Nicholas O’Brien, School of Art
Essay Games
Essay Games is an experimental game studio that creates mission-driven interactive artworks addressing pressing socio-political issues. Expanding its studio model, the initiative employs and mentors student designers to bridge academic training with professional production. Through collaborations with local non-profits and civic organizations, the studio channels interactive media into public advocacy. This research-driven framework demonstrates the artistic potential of digital games while introducing emerging creators to socially engaged alternatives beyond mainstream commercial industry pathways.
Philip Ording, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Pattern Studio
Pattern Studio is grounded in research on mathematical creativity and the material, social, and emotional processes that shape it. Patterns play a central role in art and design while mathematics is increasingly recognized as the “science of patterns.” Pattern Studio examines how contexts in art and design can foster deeper, more sustained engagement with mathematics learning.
Swati Piparsania, School of Design
Participatory Ecologies Lab
Parti-Eco is a practice-based research lab that makes education more accessible through product-based interventions and participatory action research. Situated at the intersection of play-based learning, climate futures, participatory making, and socially responsible design, the lab explores how objects can function as alternative pedagogical tools that facilitate knowledge-making, enable collaboration, and community engagement. Current projects include Climate Stories, Mobile Library, and Collective Block printing.
Keena Suh, School of Design
Joinery
Joinery explores resources to support design-build interdisciplinary collaborations that engage community-engaged projects— identifying, building upon, and expanding resources that are necessary for sustained partnerships to support curriculum and community building connected through hands-on making. Through multidisciplinary landscapes wherein tools, materials, processes, and perspectives are shared, not only can new languages and literacies emerge, but expand connections to unexpected resources and support mechanisms. This research embarks on navigating and mapping these possibilities as a shared resource.
Yi Xin Tong, Foundation
Night Repetition
Night Repetition is an evolving installation of video, sound, and text developed through nocturnal field excursions across New York Harbor. Utilizing underwater and low-light imaging systems in conditions of darkness and reflection, the project records fleeting encounters with wild fish at the threshold of human perception. Grounded in sustained artistic research into urban marine environments, the work investigates ecological awareness and non-instrumental relations, employing structured repetition to engage the often-unseen aquatic ecologies bordering the city.
Selin Ünlüönen, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Pictures as Mirrors at the Safavid Court and Beyond
Pictures as Mirrors at the Safavid Court and Beyond investigates sixteenth-century Iranian illustrated manuscripts produced amid intense political and religious upheaval. Centering on a circa-1540s copy of Nizami’s Khamsa, the book challenges conventional patron-centric readings to examine how paintings functioned for courtiers, artists, and broader publics. Tracing the manuscript’s journey from the Safavid court to England, the research illuminates its evolving agency, exploring how illustrated volumes shape, transform, and constrain viewer reception across imperial contexts.
Sam Vernon, School of Art
The Memory Studio
The Memory Studio is an interdisciplinary research studio led by Sam Vernon that explores archives, material experimentation and experimental publishing as forms of artistic research. The project brings archival materials into conversation with contemporary art, creating fresh approaches to preserving and interpreting personal and community histories. Through research, making, and publishing, the studio will support the development of artist books, prints, exhibitions, and public programs. Building on Vernon’s ongoing work with archives, printmaking, and artist publishing, the project will establish a collaborative platform connecting Pratt faculty, students, artists, scholars, and community partners.