Mark Baskinger

Mark Baskinger serves as Professor, Chair of Product Design, and Director of the Joseph Ballay Center for Design Fusion in the School of Design, and Director of the Moon Arts Group at CMU. His research interests include tangible interaction design (tangible AI), deep time artifacts, durational design and material culture, spacecraft, landers and probes, and methodologies for visual thinking.

His work has been featured in design publications and international magazines and exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, I-Space Gallery, Krannert Art Museum, Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Galeria Miejska bwa w Bydgoszczy, Vasarely Museum, Tojo House, Supercollider, among others. His work is also included in the permanent art collections of the University of Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. His work has been featured by CNN, NPR, Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Vice, and Wired, among others.

Mark is co-author of Drawing Ideas®: a hand-drawn approach for better design published in 2013 which has become a staple textbook for visual thinking methods that foster collaboration, creative agency, and innovation. As Director of the Moon Arts Group and former fellow in The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a laboratory for research at the intersections of arts, science, technology and culture, he co-directed the MoonArk project (@CMU_MoonArk), cultural payload on the first commercial lunar lander which spent 10 days in space before a mechanical anomaly forced the spacecraft back to Earth. Designed to endure the harsh lunar conditions for thousands of years, the MoonArk is a massively collaborative object intended to spark wonderment through poetically entangled narratives of the arts, humanities, sciences, and technologies. Fabrication of the MoonArk instigated innovation in digital fabrication techniques and ultra-high resolution imaging, and many developments in material science, technology, and the arts, engaging colleagues across the world in inspiring ways. The project brought together 18 universities and organizations, 11 units / 27 faculty and staff / 97 CMU alumni and students, and collectively over 300 artists, designers, educators, scientists, technologists, choreographers, poets, writers and musicians across 20 countries. MoonArk 2 and a new project called Lunarglyphs are now in development for future lunar delivery.