2022

2025

2020

2019

2018

2021

2023

2024

2026

Jennifer Horowitz

Quoc Dang

Marius Oneta

Individual Credits

Lead Designer

University or Design School

Profile Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Gz74wnuaE&t=

Project Website

This project was created as a project for an assignment in Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) course GSD 6338: Computational Design. 

Client

Harvard Graduate School of Design students: Jennifer Horowitz '22, Marius Oneta '23 (ETH Exchange), and Quoc Dang '23

Design Team

A melting permanence is the attempt to illustrate a major consequence of climate change - sea level rise - as a collection of geometric surfaces interacting with each other. 


Our student computational design team, comprised of GSD students Jennifer Horowitz ’22, Marius Oneta ’23, and Quoc Dang ’23, applied what we had learned in terms of algorithmic geometry during the semester in Professor Castillo’s Computational Design class to explore the concept of permanence/transience with C# in RhinocerosCommon (Rhino) software through the creation of unique Grasshopper components within the Rhino software platform.Our final submission for the course, titled A Melting Permanence, displays all three stages of the cyclical relationship between the tenuous interaction of man and nature as a consequence of man-made pollutants and global warming. 

Our project attempted to achieve a form of generative artistry through code titled, “A Melting Permanence”, consisting of an animated seasonal synthesis using paramedic design to display the impacts of climate change. We combined sound to the animation for a realistic depiction of the causal phenomenon we wished to express through our project. 


As temperatures rise, glaciers melt. Turning into water, they flow down through valleys and cities and eventually make the sea level rise and endanger big cities on low-lying shore lines. Glaciers - the former epitomes of permanence - become transient as they turn into something fluid; so do ironically the very concrete buildings that partially caused the glaciers to melt as they get washed away.

Our animation is a technical arrangement of the previously mentioned actants (glaciers and buildings) along a spiral-like surface which has a top and a bottom and by its continuity emphasizes on the interconnections between the two actants. The arrangement of buildings and glaciers works a probability distribution where buildings are more likely to populate the bottom of the spiral whereas the glaciers populate the top. The buildings’ height increases hereby with lower altitude while the further up one goes the spiral, the glaciers become bigger and bigger. To carry forward the nature of this relationship further, we set the glaciers and building structures along a continuous loop. 

Eventually, drops of melting ice fall down from the edge of the spiral towards the buildings. They add up to one flat surface derived from the spiral surface which illustrates the sea level. The more drops of water fall down, the higher the sea level gets and the more buildings get flooded.

Silver Winner in Mix Media/Moving Image for Social Change

Silver Winner in Digital Art for Social Change