Sea Change

COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

A cross-discipline collaboration between science and design reveals the hidden lives of sand dollars.

Most people think they are familiar with sand dollars, collecting them as souvenirs on the beach or recognizing them as a common coastal decorative motif. But few realize that what they see washing ashore is merely the skeleton of the creature itself. They never see the living animal–vibrant in colors ranging from green to violet and covered in fine spines that allow it to move and eat. They have no idea that it began life as a microscopic larva and gained its adult form through a complex metamorphosis. And they certainly don’t know how climate change, so big and complex it is hard to grasp, affects these tiny larvae. This is why three California State University, Long Beach professors from vastly different disciplines came together to bring this story to light.

Associate Professor Douglas Pace in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Assistant Professor Siavash Ahrar in the College of Engineering wanted to increase awareness about the crisis sea creatures are facing as the ocean temperature rises, and they wanted to do it in a tangible way. They went to Assistant Professor Behnaz Farahi in the College of the Arts with an idea for a grant.

“It was a very easy ask, because it was like, I love the ocean, and I’d love to know about sand dollars,” remembers Dr. Farahi. But she was the perfect partner for the project at a deeper level. “I’m really fascinated by the role of art and design in increasing awareness, in making something that is a little invisible to something that is visible,” she says.

In 2022, the three co-principal investigators (co-PIs) won a $25,000 Faculty Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Seed Grant from California State University’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network (STEM-NET). The group hosted the resulting exhibition over four days in February 2024 at CSULB’s Innovation Space.

Dr. Farahi, who calls her field “critical design”, believes in critical making as a pedagogy for developing projects that bring design, science, and technology together to create conversation.

The Innovation Space was the ideal venue for the exhibition. “We wanted to create an immersive experience where the audience would enter into this almost laboratory space where they would learn about the life of sand dollars, from small larval states to adult,” she says. The exhibit showed visitors how larval sand dollars react to their environment by changing their size and shape as the water temperature changes or food becomes scarce at three stations inside the Innovation Space. Two stations featured microscopes, one that exhibited live adult sand dollars and one that displayed larvae. Viewers saw what was under both microscopes on the 360-degree screens in the Innovation Space. A third interactive station featured 3-D-printed models of different larvae that could be moved around a surface to change the information displayed on the wall.

The interactive nature of the exhibit presented some challenges for the team. They wanted to make sure everything could run on its own, but it was more complex than a video projection. “We had to make sure the software communication with the central computer worked properly and there were no glitches in the system,” says Dr. Farahi. The interactive station with the 3-D models of larvae combined a camera and objects printed with QR codes, which had never been done in the Innovation Space. Dr. Farahi also wanted to make sure future students and faculty could benefit from her experience and created a GitHub for their future use. “Part of the challenge was really to set up the system not just for the exhibition but for future explorations of interactive experience design,” she says.

CSULB students from all three disciplines were involved in the development and execution of the project. Students taking Dr. Farahi’s Design of User Experience course were asked to design an immersive experience that highlights the crisis facing ocean life, and their concepts and ideas helped the co-PIs plan their exhibition. Dr. Farahi’s students were also involved in designing the larval models and printing them on the 3-D printers at the Innovation Space. Engineering students worked with Dr. Ahrar to simulate and visualize the fluid dynamics affecting the larvae. Finally, Dr. Pace’s marine biology students looked after the live organisms both in the laboratory and in the exhibit space. “I was amazed at the way the students were showing up in the exhibition. They were communicating with the audience, and they were so happy and excited because all of a sudden they were immersed in something that usually they study under a microscope,” says Dr. Farahi. “They took charge as though it was their own project, and that was very satisfying,” she adds.

Dr. Farahi regards cross-disciplinary involvement as a rewarding outcome of the project and an important motivator for future efforts. “I think we are at a new era when the boundaries between different disciplines are more than ever blurring, and I think this is an amazing opportunity for growth, for innovation,” says Dr. Farahi. “It’s always comfortable to stay in your own disciplinary way of doing things, but I say the thing is to be open and curious, and to be uncomfortable at times. Because that’s where true innovation happens.”