Design faculty update > Elpitha Tsoutsounakis 

We are pleased to announce founding faculty member, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, will transition to tenure-track as an Assistant Professor beginning January 1. She will step down as Associate Director of the program in order to fully dedicate her attention to scholarship. 

Elpitha joined the College of Architecture + Planning in 2010 as an adjunct faculty in the School of Architecture teaching beginning design and architecture studios. In 2014 she took an appointment as clinical faculty in the newly established Multi-disciplinary Design Program and has since been an integral part of establishing curriculum, administrative structures, and academic culture. Having taught over 30 studios in architecture and design, her main focus in studio pedagogy is complemented by courses taught in typographic communication, visual strategy, design research methods, and design history and theory. She has led students on many camping trips and field excursions to public lands throughout Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana. In an attempt to dissuade our product design students from generating more thoughtless products, she established the Field Studio which has partnered with Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone Forever, Friends of Cedar Mesa, The Rural Utah Project, and the Bears Ears National Monument. 

Her scholarship explores public land management in two, inter-dependent, modalities: (1) Leveraging design as a product for the facilitation of stewardship, management, and community engagement in the Fieldwork Platform complemented by (2) the development of an ethical grounding through creative work in a critical design practice. Her current project, “Unknown Prospect”, is a speculative investigation of our collective ecological consciousness conducted through design research, physical product, and publication. Ochres collected at various mining sites through-out Utah articulate the print production of maps, atlases, and artists books that re-write narratives of the land and our relationship to it. The codex and printed page become powerful tools for shifting discourse by describing place though the materiality of color on a geological time scale.  

Link to faculty profile.