Night White Skies

Gretchen Bakke is the author of 'The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future'. Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Cultural Anthropology. Her work focuses on the chaos and creativity that emerges during social, cultural, and technological transitions. For the past decade she has been researching and writing about the changing culture of electricity in the United States. In addition to her work on electric power systems she has done research in the Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and in Cuba. She is a former fellow in Wesleyan University’s Science in Society Program, a former Fulbright fellow, and is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. Born in Portland, Oregon, Bakke lives in Montreal.

Douglas Pancoast, was featured in New City Magazine's list Design 50: Who Shapes Chicago 2016. New City featured Douglas for his project, The Array of Things, which will be installed in April, 2016. Awarded a $3.1 million grant by the National Science Foundation, the project will create a network of interactive, modular sensor boxes that will be installed around Chicago to collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use.  Douglas Pancoast is an Associate Professor, Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects (2002). BArch, 1991, University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design; MArch, 1995, Cranbrook Academy of Art. Exhibitions: National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.; Architectural League of New York; Cranbrook Kingswood Gallery. Publications: Princeton Architectural Press; Oculus; Architecture; The Architectural Review. Awards: Architectural League of New York Young Architects Forum Competition; Charles E. Peterson Prize

Peter Lloyd Jones is a hybrid innovator, scientist and academic whose initial discoveries have uncovered fundamental mechanisms in stem cell biology, embryogenesis and human disease, including breast cancer and lung development. Jones’s work actively seeks and finds new solutions to complex problems via extreme collaborations within seemingly unrelated fields, including fashion, industrial, textile and architectural design. Following completion of his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in Genetics and Pathology, Jones conducted post-doctoral fellowships in 3-D Biology with Drs. Mina Bissell and Marlene Rabinovitch at UC Berkeley and The University of Toronto, respectively. Currently, he is the first Associate Dean of Emergent Design and Creative Technologies at The Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University (TJU; Est1825), where in 2013, he founded MEDstudio@JEFF; a research and education space focused on discovering new and dignified solutions in health care using approaches rooted in human-cent

Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D., Assoc. AIA - is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Formerly, he was an architect at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. He as been awarded a Fulbright grant and fellowships with TED, Moshe Safdie, and Martin Society for Sustainability. He was chosen by Wired magazine for "The Smart List” and selected by Rolling Stone for “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Mitchell won many honors including; AIA New York Urban Design Merit Award, 1st Place International Architecture Award, Victor Papanek Social Design Award, Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability, History Channel Infiniti Award for City of the Future, and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He's featured as “The NOW 99” in Dwell magazine and “50 Under 50 Innovators of the 21st Century" by Images Publishers. He co-authored the books, “Super Cells: Building with Biology” and “Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned”. His design work has been exhibited at MoMA and

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. Ed’s research and teaching explore digital narratives, contemporary culture and the intersection of the humanities, arts and sciences. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, Spring 2017) and the co-editor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, Spring 2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future(William Morrow, September 2014). He completed his PhD in English and American literature at Stanford University in 2011. Before graduate school Ed worked as a journalist at Time, Slate and Popular Science. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2002 with a Comparative Literature major and certificates in Applications of Computing, Creative Wr

Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov are Associate Professors at the University of Michigan Tuabman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and founding principals of the design-research practice RVTR. Their work and writing explores the agency of architecture and urban design within the context of dynamic ecological systems, infrastructures, energies, materially and technologically mediated environments, and emerging social organizations. Their body of work in “responsive envelopes” has been developing composite material systems that operate as thick, sensing skins that are integrated with sensing, intelligence, kinetic action, and interaction capabilities. This work has been published in Leonardo, IJAC, JAE, eVolo, [bracket] Goes Soft, and featured in in Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship with Nature by Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer, Paradigms in Computing by David Gerber and Mariana Ibanez, Performative Materials in Architecture by Rashida Ng and Sneha Patel, and High Performance Homes by F

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

On this innagural podcast, we have Filip Tejchman, who is an architect and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He’s also the principal of Untitled Office. In this episode we talk about his ongoing research called ‘Beyond the Invisible Rainbow’. We discuss the use of energy as a material to build space with and what this means for tools designers use and how this can inform new shapes and forms for design.