Making It Real: Yash Nasikkar, BA Design Media Arts
The prompt was minimal. Here's a light bulb and a plug. Now build everything around it.
Yash Nasikkar fondly remembers that first-year assignment in a fabrication course titled "Form," where he gleefully learned to use woodcutters and 3D printers. Making something with a powerful tool is a skill set that translates to keeping up with explosions of new technology, he said.
It was a strong reinforcement for a student developing a digital practice in the age of AI.
"No one wants an algorithm or data to determine, like, what is creative and what isn't," he said. "It doesn't know what creativity is. We, as the users, know what that is."
Nasikkar, who grew up partly in Singapore and India before his family moved to the Bay Area, has deep roots at UCLA. His father, a graphic designer and early creative influence, is an alum, and his twin brother is also graduating this year from the Design Media Arts program in the School of the Arts and Architecture.
With his capstone project, "Liminal Signal," Nasikkar hearkens back to that early training in materials. The real-time interactive installation uses TouchDesigner and a depth camera controlled by a custom device built from laser-cut and woodworked parts. As viewers step in front of the camera, they'll see a representation of their image stylized by particles and colors. An earlier project, born out of an "Experiments in Virtuality" course, was a branding campaign for Vizmod, a fictional interactive music visualizer Nasikkar conceptualized.
After graduation he's aiming to work at small studios in branding, motion design and art direction, inspired by professor and alum Mindy Seu, who he called "a legend in DMA and the design world." Nasikkar is currently interning at Fuser Studio, an AI startup building a platform to help designers use AI intentionally, bringing their own sketches and references into a process, rather than accepting what a single prompt might generate.
"It's our responsibility to guide the AI tool to work in an authentic way without masking your original intent," he said.
