Faculty News: Karen Cheng

Design Associate Professor Karen Cheng has been nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in the Communication Design category. Award candidates are nominated by a national committee of more than 2,500 design professionals, educators, critics, and patrons. She is currently a Co-Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation grant titled “Contextual Research-Empirical: Improving Visual Communication in Nanotechnology.” A new video produced by Design student Jeremy Juel features the projects that Cheng and Assistant Professor Kristine Matthews created for PACCAR Hall on the UW Seattle campus. One of these is the Foster Exchange, which we wrote about earlier. Cheng recently received funding from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities to support a project titled “Letters from France: Jean François Porchez on Culture and Identity in Type Design,” which will bring well-known type designer Porchez to Seattle to give lectures and work with UW students.