BIOGRAPHY – Andy Bennett

I am currently on the faculty at Emerson College in Boston. I teach within the Dept. of Visual and Media Arts at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I have been developing the curriculum and the 3-D Lab for students pursuing a New Media major. My interests are 3-D design process, interdisciplinary and collaborative uses of 3-D media in studio projects, and how architectural space, form, light, color, and texture, can be design precedents for our experience (real or virtual) of information.

My work in digital media spans from educational research projects developing language-learning tools to interfaces for specialized corporate applications. My clients have included Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and MIT. Throughout all my work I seek to use 3-D techniques, visualization, and spatial thinking to help inform the design process and to create a unique approach to problem solving. Two CD-ROMs, “Seeing the Unseen,” published by MIT Press and “Star Festival,” published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrate my 3-D interface and simulation design work.

I am also an Architect. My recent practice has been freelance, and prior to teaching at Emerson College, as a Project Architect for Elkus / Manfredi Architects Ltd, where my projects included Downtown Disney – Anaheim, CA, House of Blues – Anaheim, Champs prototype stores in New York, Florida, and Minnesota, and FootLocker prototype stores in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Through 15 years of practice I’ve have designed and built residential, corporate, and specialized, theme retail and restaurant projects.

I received my Masters in Architecture from MIT and a Bachelors in Human Ecology with emphasis on environmental design at College of the Atlantic. My research and thesis work at MIT involved prototyping digital design tools to advance computation in the architectural design studio.