As engineers and creators, faculty, staff, alumni and students were invited to explore the interplay between engineering and art through the Art of Engineering Challenge. Participants considered the beauty enabled and expressed through engineering, such as physical assembly, CAD, coding and other elegant visualizations of data, information or design, and, alternatively, used traditional artist’s mediums like paint, pencil, photography and engineering know-how to share the beauty of the engineering design process.
Students, faculty, staff and alumni submitted visual artifacts that celebrate the aesthetic beauty of engineering. These art pieces are displayed around our common spaces and labs as a reminder of the relationship between engineering and art.
Female Pioneers in Their Field — Awarded Best Collection
Lindsay Landstad, Katie Seidl, Bora Joo, Sai Rama Balakrishnan, Vi-Linh Vu and Naomi Nicole Donato (2022)
As students from Cal Poly’s Women Involved in Hardware and Software, we decided that nothing would be more inspiring or welcoming to women in engineering than seeing female pioneers in their field. We sought to make aesthetically pleasing posters of these women, and also tried to focus on women of color as we wanted to foster and celebrate diversity at Cal Poly, as it is an area in which we hope to see improvements in the coming years.
Glycerin Cocktail — Awarded Platinum & Dean’s Appreciation
Tuyetthuc Nguyen and Wanjiku Gichigi (2022)
Is this a jellyfish? Or a bullet? The magic of this sequence is that it is found in a mundane, everyday occurrence: water emptying from a bottle. This piece reflects just a snippet of the research being explored by the Mayer Fluids Research Group in Cal Poly’s Fluids Lab.
The Knowledge Map — Awarded Gold
Kalen Goo (2022)
The Knowledge Map represents the complex relationship between courses and study programs at Cal Poly. It shows how the knowledge taught in classes is shared among study programs across the university.
I want to invite people to explore The Knowledge Map and discover what resonates with them. Wherever you begin, you’re guaranteed to find yourself connected in the end.
A True-Color Optical Micrograph — Awarded Silver
James Matthew Seidlinger (2022)
A true-color optical micrograph of the dendritic formation of the oxidized surface of Al2FeCoNiCu high-entropy alloy.
Life on Pluto? — Awarded Dean’s Appreciation
Anna Reid, Gabe Limotta, Riley Froomin and Angela Chawla (2022)
This piece is an animated short that we worked on in one of our classes. It relates to both art and engineering in that we had creative freedom with designing the models, while simultaneously learning about representing physics, movement, etc. in an animated setting.
AI Sculpted Terrain— Awarded Dean’s Appreciation
Hunter Borlik (2022)
This image is composed of four different terrain elevation maps generated by a machine learning model. The terrain of Earth is often the central element of a scene, making up most visible details in games and everyday life. These images are the products of a project aimed at simplifying custom terrain creation.
Blade Profile— Awarded Dean’s Appreciation
Josephine Maiorano (2022)
This picture shows the airfoil profile shapes as they change along the length of a wind turbine blade. The blade it is derived from was designed for the Cal Poly Wind Power Club’s competition turbine.
