July 8, 2025
A Look Back at Standout Projects from Last Year
"A spirit of responding creatively and responsibly to the world around us infused so many of the projects that emerged last year."
A Look Back at Standout Projects from Last Year
At NuVu, while our commitment to a rigorous creative process remains constant, the projects our students create span a vast range of disciplines and ideas. On any given day, you might find students experimenting with materials, producing podcasts, collaborating with community partners, or engineering robotic solutions to real-world problems. What connects them all is a deep sense of inquiry and a drive to design with purpose.
Each year, our studios evolve to reflect new questions and urgent challenges. In Off the Grid: Syria Edition, students confronted the crumbling infrastructure of a town in Syria. Some reimagined the physical spaces of learning, while others developed immersive, hands-on curricula to reignite a love of discovery among local students. That spirit of responding creatively and responsibly to the world around us infused so many of the projects that emerged last year.
Here are a few that stood out:
Material as Message
In Visceral Trinkets, Bridget Kraemer dove into a visceral world of material history, working with hair, insect wings, and other unexpected elements to produce art that was strange, compelling, and deeply researched. The project drew from feminist minimalism and artists like Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta, yet felt wholly original in its haunting elegance.
Pick Smith, a set of handcrafted brass and copper banjo picks, reimagined wearable supports through the lens of traditional metalsmithing. This project stood out not just for its craft, but for the deliberate move away from digital fabrication toward older, slower techniques.
Personal Stories, Global Questions
Jade’s Open Source Insulin Pump grew from a personal connection to diabetes into a robust exploration of open medical hardware. Her process, rooted in real-world conversations with researchers and designers, unfolded across the year beginning in the studio Local Agents of Change and developing into Jade’s capstone project. It’s a striking example of how personal storytelling can drive innovation.
Beckett’s The Police in Your Pocket took on the quiet creep of surveillance tech. Part investigative documentary, part technical solution, the project raised questions about privacy, generational trust, and the systems around us.
Designing for Social Impact
In collaboration with the Ahimsa Collective, students in the Re-Entry Housing studio designed tiny homes for formerly incarcerated individuals. Traveling to California, they connected with returning citizens and community leaders, gaining insight that shaped thoughtful architectural proposals grounded in restorative justice.
Learning through Play
Playful Spaces explored how play can foster empathy, connection, and community engagement. Instead of designing in isolation, students co-created with children and parents at the Eliot School, learning to listen, adapt, and design with real users in mind.
In Brown Bear Bonanza, students built a near life-sized puzzle of a grizzly bear to help third graders understand animal endangerment through hands-on collaboration and storytelling. Brainstorming Disk Drop reimagined a classic game with NuVu’s creative process as the theme, turning iterative design into a playful, modular experience.
Tech, Math, and Making It Intuitive
In P.R.E.S., students tackled one of the trickiest challenges new students face: presenting ideas. Using image and video processing, they built a web app that provides feedback on posture and speech, making the invisible visible for future oral presenters.
Nico’s Astrophotography project in the Computational Calculus seminar transformed abstract math into something tangible. By exploring how to track stars and cancel out Earth’s rotation, he showed how calculus can ground even the most celestial subjects.
Finally, in Home Assistive Robotics, a team of students built a Python package to simplify the complex math behind robotic arms. Their project, now live on GitHub, not only demonstrated technical mastery but also an understanding of what it means to contribute to a wider open-source community.
🔗 GitHub
These are just a few glimpses into the incredible range of thinking, making, and questioning that took place last year. What binds them isn’t just technical skill or artistic flair—but the desire to understand the world more deeply, and to shape it more thoughtfully.
