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With project-based curricula and dozens of electives that allow students to follow their passions, the Creative Technology and Design (CTD) program at the ATLAS Institute doesn’t lend itself to tidy explanations—so at ATLAS EXPO, students take a show-and-tell approach.

CTD students will fill four floors of the Roser ATLAS Center with projects on Friday, April 24, showcasing web and mobile designs; multi-material physical fabrication; virtual and augmented reality experiences; video and sound installations; digital and physical games; interactive exhibitions; motion-capture projects; and works that simply defy definition.��

“​​ATLAS EXPO is one of the rare spaces where you actually get to see and experience the full spectrum of what students are capable of,” explained Annie Margaret, an ATLAS faculty member who teaches CTD’s senior-year Capstone sequence, where students conceive of and create projects that showcase the skills they’ve developed throughout the program. Many of the 100+ projects visitors see at EXPO are developed in this program-culminating course.

“But EXPO isn’t just polished final products or projects for clients,” Margaret said. “It displays depth of thinking, weird ideas, emotional expression, technical skill, and creative risk all in one place. Games, tools, research, art, experiences—you’ll see something deeply personal sitting right next to something highly functional or market-ready. That combination, authentic creative expression alongside real-world application, is what makes ATLAS feel special.”��

Storytelling as process

Students stand with their prototypes throughout EXPO to discuss their process, having spent much of the semester refining both the project itself��and the narrative around the work.��

“An integral piece of the CTD program is teaching students how to tell the story of their work,” said ATLAS Institute Director Mark Gross. “Storytelling is crucial to the design process—from communicating with team members to building the best product for your audience, it all comes down to how well you can talk about what you’ve created. And that includes talking about what��didn’t work.”����

Storytelling is woven into all six of the CTD core undergraduate classes—Image, Sound, Text, Web, Form and Object—which teach freshmen and sophomores the fundamentals of image making, audio engineering, graphic design, web development, fabrication and physical computing. This eclectic grouping of classes arms students with a broad set of technical skills and a fine-tuned creative practice.��

Focus electives then allow students to pave a path to their passions, taking deeper dives into fields like neuroscience, augmented and virtual reality, computer programming, audio engineering, lighting design, game development, motion graphics and immersive installations.����

An interdisciplinary program in practice

As a degree conferred by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, CTD is a technically rigorous program that requires students to complete classical engineering courses alongside design-focused CTD classes. This blend creates an interdisciplinary experience that equips students with the tools they need to work across a variety of industries.��

EXPO captures the many interests and skills that make CTD a dynamic degree.��

Visitors can expect to see alternative arcade games with unique controllers, sensory-driven works, innovative re-designs of current products, problem-solving apps, creative storytelling and more. Some projects are existential, others rooted in real-world problems—and some are simply meant to bring joy.��

“The golf putting green project (SmartSlope, ATLAS EXPO 2025, a collaboration by Tom Polaski, Eli Jordan and Jaskarn Kahlon) is a great example of playful, physical interaction design that brings people together in a really immediate way,” said Margaret. “Absurdly Alive by AJ Terio (2025) was an animated piece that leaned fully into artistic expression and emotional experience, and wasn’t trying to be anything other than what it was. Those are often the projects people remember.”

The range of work found at EXPO reflects CTD’s structure.��

“This program is hard to define—and that is by design,” said Sheiva Rezvani, an ATLAS faculty member and director of undergraduate programs. “We want students to experiment and define what Creative Technology and Design means for this moment.”��

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