Nicole Koltick is an assistant professor in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University and a principal in the research practice lutz/koltick. She is the director of the Design Futures Lab where she leads a graduate research group in critical design practices and speculative proposals focused on three main areas of inquiry: tangible interaction in the built environment, the incorporation of novel advancements in science and computation into our built environments, and new models for ambient communication. Koltick pursues a diverse trans-disciplinary collaborative research agenda that seeks to synthesize and explore a variety of ideas and methodologies in the service of novel design narratives and outcomes.
Koltick’s current research interests include future speculation, robotics, computation, artificial intelligence, speculative realism, and interactive environments. She is interested in exploring the boundaries between technology, science, the “natural”, the built environment and its inhabitants. Koltick works with complex and fantastical narratives as well as multi-agent systems and advanced computational strategies to envision new landscapes, environments, and territories for inhabitation. She regularly writes on issues pertaining to these interests and has recently completed papers on the aesthetics of emergence, artificial intelligence and aesthetics, issues of materiality and agency in the future, transdisciplinary design methodologies, and speculative realist approaches to very large organizations. She has been published recently in VOLUME, fresh punches, Encoding Architecture and featured on thecreator'sproject, suckerpunch, Architizer, dezeen, fast company, and other technology and design blogs. Koltick recently gave a TEDx talk on the work of the Design Futures Lab.
Nicole Koltick
Studios
Van Zorn (formerly Kirby)
Nicole Koltick worked in the Van Zorn (formerly Kirby) studio.
Constructed thanks to a bequest from Sarah L. Kirby, Kirby Studio was the last new building to be erected during Mrs. MacDowell’s leadership (1907-1951). The load-bearing masonry walls were laid by local mason Augustus Beaulieu atop a fieldstone foundation. A 1995 renovation preserved the brick fireplace with wooden mantel and…