How we're reimagining the future
Harnessing innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration, CAMD bridges research and creative practice to reimagine and reshape the future. Our college includes practitioners in a variety of artistic disciplines, scientific researchers, designers, technology innovators, and scholars who integrate theory and praxis for deep impact. CAMD faculty also work across disciplines spanning computer science, health sciences, engineering, and social sciences, and are engaged in industry, policy, and local and global communities. By focusing on how we perceive, what we create, and how we communicate, CAMD is human centered at its core. In an age defined by rapid technological change and the rise of AI, the creative approaches and critical thinking fostered here have never been more essential.
As technology and biomedical innovation reshape healthcare, there is a critical need for embodied, participatory and holistic approaches to health and wellbeing. CAMD research integrates theater, music, art, media and dance with cognitive science, psychology, communication and robotics for participatory exploration and therapeutic applications across the lifespan, including healthy aging, addiction recovery, rehabilitation, and mental health support. CAMD researchers also examine how environments can be designed to promote health equity and foster wellbeing.
The climate crisis and interlinked biodiversity and environmental justice crises demand profound systemic transformation across society. While technical and scientific solutions are essential, transformative changes require shifts in how humans live, think, communicate and act. Architects, artists, communicators and designers in CAMD bring practical experience in spatial justice, urban planning, policy innovation, building science, materials innovation, circular economy design and design for repair to innovate approaches critically needed for a sustainable and resilient future.
Humanistic AI research critically examines AI in society and builds systems that benefit people by enhancing creativity, health, civic participation and education. As rapid AI advancement introduces stressors from job displacement to privacy concerns, CAMD researchers investigate art, media and entertainment as tools for connection and meaning. CAMD faculty engage constituencies with data through visual communication, interactive media and material representations. Recognizing information control is intertwined with power, CAMD takes critical perspectives on AI, governance and institutions to design systems integrating AI, data visualization, social media and robotics promoting wellbeing, security, democracy and sustainability.
Our physicality shapes how we interact with our environment and others. Embodied technology designs tools aligning with innate ways people move, sense and engage with the world. Extended realities—AR, VR and MR—replicate reality and create new simulations for health, wellbeing, education, decision analysis and teaming. CAMD faculty unite expertise in product innovation, service design, co-design, user experience and inclusive design with creative practices to reveal hidden assumptions and explore sensory dimensions of technology. This interdisciplinary synergy accelerates innovation while ensuring advancements remain human-centered, functional, aesthetically compelling and ethical.
