Features

Summer 2017
L+A Landscape Architecture

Down to the Earth

When Ron Henderson left the architecture firm where he was working in the early 1990s to study landscape architecture, he told his boss that he wanted to discover what the dirt told him he should build. “I’ve always had that instinct that a bounded project, a building, simply could not engage the world at the scale that I wanted a project to engage,” he says. Since then he has designed landscapes around the world—China, France, and North America—and is a noted expert on Chinese and Japanese gardens.
Summer 2017
Denis Weil

The Practice of Design

Moving from the corporate to the public and social sectors is the most recent step in the dynamic career of ID’s newly appointed dean, Denis Weil (M.Des. ’01). This self-proclaimed “millennial in a boomer body” brings design leadership expertise gained from positions at McDonald’s, IDEO, and Procter & Gamble. From the social sector, he brings the practice of collaborating with multiple stakeholders at Year Up, Sanergy, and Mercy Corps, and the belief that design is uniquely positioned to act as catalyst and facilitator for addressing the world’s big challenges.
Spring 2017
Eunice Santos

Natural Path

It does not require an algorithm to uncover the reasons behind Eunice Santos’s career trajectory and her decision to come to Illinois Tech to chair the computer science department. Now the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair, chair of the Department of Computer Science, and professor of computer science at Illinois Tech, Santos, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a mathematics professor, recognized her innate capacity for STEM disciplines early in life. She graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and math before earning her doctoral degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Spring 2017
From g-Force to V-Force

From g-Force to V-Force

The high school student is safely strapped into the seat of the amusement park roller coaster. She selects the “Roller Coaster” mode in the Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite app, secures her smart phone in her pocket, and enjoys the ride as the car climbs slowly over the waiting crowd below, pauses dramatically at the top of the track, and then plunges downward. After the laughter subsides and her heart returns to its normal rate, the student checks her phone. The app has employed its various sensors to measure, collect, display, and record data, such as g-force.