We'll get started in a few minutes, but feel free to introduce yourself in the chat. Everyone, welcome. We're going to get started in just one second. And welcome everyone. My name is Kirsten McNally, pronouns she her. I'm an educator at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and welcome to our conversation design career fair portfolio review. This conversation is part of National Design Month, which honors innovation impact and recognizes the power of design to change the world. Thank you to our leadership sponsors, Facebook, Shelby and Frederick Gantz, Hewitt and Edward Hintz, the Hirsch Family Foundation, IBM, Crystal and Chris Saka, for making National Design Month possible and to Adobe for supporting the design career fair series. Before we just get started, just a quick access check will be using closed captioning for this program so you can access that by hitting the CC button on your zoom toolbar. We'll be together for about an hour and a half until 7pm Eastern, but take breaks when you need get comfortable and also know that we'll be recording this so you can always return to it later we really want this to be a resource for all of you. So if you're interested in developing a design portfolio and are unsure where to start, you are in the right place. Or if you'd like to see examples of great student work from peers, you're also in the right place. Tonight we'll be taking a sneak peek at four amazing design portfolios from two high school students, one college student and one graduate student with reviews from National Design Award winners. So in other words, experts in the field. Building a portfolio is such an important and personal process and we hope that throughout these reviews you find inspiration and insight for your own portfolio. Along the way we'd also love for you to share your support and feedback with one another in the chat. So, when sharing any feedback in the chat remember what you share should be constructive and supportive. I find this little format to be incredibly helpful. So it says I like I wish I wonder. So when sharing feedback feel free to share something you like, maybe something you wish to have learned or have seen, or maybe something you wonder about what you're seeing. We'll end the session with about a 10 minute Q&A at the end so feel free if you have questions. Be it about something you saw or heard or maybe about building your own portfolio, put that in the Q&A box and we will get to that at the end of our program. So before we get started you might be interested in getting to know our amazing reviewers. So I'm going to turn it over to them to tell us who they are as well as give us their top portfolio tip. So I'm going to hand it over now to Becca McCarran Tran, our 2021 National Design Award winner in fashion design. I'm Becca. I'm the founder and creative director of Chromat, and I'm calling you today from Brooklyn, New York, very excited to see all this amazing work. I guess I could tell you a quick snippet about Chromat. I studied architecture and Chromat evolved as a way to build structural experiments on the human body I love architecture and I still am very interested in spatial design but what I love about fashion is the rapid pace you can design and build an idea in a few hours versus buildings which take years to come to fruition so I really love the fast pace of this design process and as you can see the kind of scaffolding and structures are still very prevalent in this scale as well. So anyway, looking forward to seeing everyone's work. Thanks for having me. Thanks Becca. We'll also hear from Tosh Kodama of Imaginary Forces. Hello. Hi, I'm Tosh Kodama. I'm a creative director at Imaginary Forces. So Imaginary Forces we're known for our main title design we do a lot more than that but the world knows us through some really great main titles and you might know some of them like Mad Men, and then even some of them like animations like Netflix and Marvel. And then just recently, if you watch Apple Plus we have a few titles that we've done like Leasy Story Foundation, and then just released Invasion so that's the type of work that we do and that you probably seen sort of you know, like viewing your favorite shows. One of what's great about these reviews is like the way I am in contact with students is usually through internships like we review a lot of intern portfolios and that's where I get in contact with students. And every year we hire or actually three times a year, maybe three, four interns per semester. So we're constantly looking at portfolios and you know, I mean the obvious thing is, you know, you obviously show your best work, but you also have to edit it down make sure you only show the best work right because because you don't want to be brought down by your, you know, least impactful work. And then the other thing is, you know, people think it's all about the work, but especially when we hire interns, it's about their personality too. So people forget like the about page that the writing in the about page says a lot about you. So like, you just you have to be just as creative in that section to so you can just say list of all the things you've done and awards you've won. But it's, it's like be creative with your voice, right so just just be in touch with that and understand that it's the whole package and not just design but we hire, you know, the person to so so don't get too lost in the work. Thanks Tosh. That's something that's worth remembering right.  Yeah, so I'm Dora Sung, I am in Los Angeles, I wear several hats. One of them is for this project you see here which is a smart window system that automatically shades when the sun hits the pieces and they're very smart in themselves. So that's through a company called TVM Designs which is a startup company that was to take off from my research company called Dosu Studio Architecture where I'm the founder. In addition to that I actually am the director of the undergraduate programs in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. I work at many, many portfolios every year. This past year probably went through about 600 portfolios, because I do admissions for both the undergrad and the graduate schools. So I've been doing that for many, many years. My word of advice of advice for people submitting portfolios to architecture schools. I don't feel compelled that it has to be architectural work that you have to show whatsoever, but do make sure that whatever you present is extremely clean and well presented you do not have to gain a lot of information on a single slide. It's almost better that you present your work on individual slides. So that would be my word of advice. Certainly plenty of experience, 10,000 hours per house. And we have Mia Lair also joining us. Mia may not be able to join us until the end, but we'll be reviewing a student portfolio in landscape architecture. And Mia is the president of Studio MLA and will be joining us later on. Studio MLA is the recipient of the Landscape Architecture Award this year for the National Design Awards. And for those of you who might not know what landscape architecture is, it has to do with the planning and design of both the built environment and the national world around us. As you can see in a lot of these amazing examples, but we will also hear from a landscape architecture student and learn a little bit more about that later on in the review. So thank you all so much. Are we ready to get started with our review? I'll take it as a yes. So I'm so excited to hand it over to Doran Kim. Doran is a student at University of Texas at Austin studying textiles and fashion design. And Doran's work will be reviewed by Beckham McCarron Tran. So over to you Doran and I will give you remote access. Thank you. Hi, my name is Doran Kim. I study textiles and apparel at the University of Texas. Fashion for me is a tool to express myself and to communicate with other people. My passion for fashion right now is in sustainability. I think sustainable fashion is not an option anymore, but essential. So my portfolio has four of my projects. It's the project has three or four pages. So the first project is called the replay. It is a sustainable fashion collection. I try to include my inspiration, images, drawings and colors on the first page with the title. The second page I put my final outcomes. And then I start to explain how I started to work on this project. So I got inspired by this exact discardee, the class five quarters, and of course there is swatch books at a thrift store I love to go to. I felt like I felt bad to see so many discardee materials, so I wanted to use them for my piece. As I described here, this collection is kind of to summarize all the ways to generate. With that I overly made my garments shiny and colorful. So these are my first and second dresses. And then these are my third and last pieces and the jacket from the last piece was sold to my professor, briefly. And the next next project is metaverse, which I was inspired by.  After the 3d figures I put my 2d flats. So the first item is long vast. If you close the vast, it becomes a dress. The next item we have a hoodie and a pair of white pants, and then dress and a top white waist belt and shoes. So metaverse is virtual shared space, so it's like fortnight or the Zeppero for the people who are not familiar with it. It is a really growing market. The CEO of Netflix said that their biggest arrival in the future will be fortnight instead of Disney plus or HBO. I put some of my 3d designs down at the bottom of the left. And this is my inspiration board for the collection. I included my pattern design and some fabrics. And with my cold outs and front and back. The third project is for the sequel, that is this figure on the left. This is an art piece I founded a museum on campus. And I was that piece led me to this water pollution that the fashion industry generates because this sequel in the forum lives under the water. So, yeah, I tried to be sustainable again. I used to get the fabric for the dress. And this is the outcome. This is the photoshoot of the dress and this was featured in one of the singers in a pool residing Austin. So I wanted to include it here. And my last project is for the design for disassembly. This is the photoshoot. So the design for disassembly is a fairly new concept for sustainable fashion design. It uses fewer components, less material and zero trims, meaning zippers or buttons or something like that. So that I can be disassembled after it's end used and then reused for another cycle of usage. So this project was for my global sustainable fashion design internship in Copenhagen, Denmark. So this is the final pattern for the design for disassembly project. So with this pattern, the fashion company doesn't need to waste any fabric. So this pattern enables the zero waste manufacturer and it doesn't need any trims. And of course it can be reassembled after it's end used. I had the opportunity to present my work at the college of Copenhagen, I believe. So on this page, I try to explain that after this first piece of DFT garments, we can disassemble this piece and make the next design as shown here and then another design as followed. And this page is just to show my skills with the fabric. And that is all. Thank you. Thank you so much, Doran. We'll kick it over to Becca. Congratulations, Doran. This portfolio is super strong and amazing. So just want to give you a shout out for this. I feel like when I was first looking at a portfolio, the thing that struck me more than anything is that you really are passionate about sustainability. And that sustainability, that through line is so clear and evident in each iteration.  There are so many different ways in which you can express your passion for sustainability and it's really cool to see how like versatile you are and how many different things that you have explored during your time as a student. So that is really, really cool to see. So congratulations. One other thing I really loved about your portfolio is the way that each page is really full with color, texture, images, like backdrops. So every page has like even the one where you had, like the water color splotches in the backdrop, like it definitely feels that each page of your portfolio is really highly considered. It really took time to kind of create an experience with each page. It's not just informative. Well, I feel like the most important page is the one you have on right now. But if you put through like, you know, there's just so much lushness and so much color so much texture, and you can really feel like your love of like craft and so that really struck me. There was a few things that I felt like I would have done differently if it was my portfolio, which is one thing is font, like graphic design font. You kind of switch between each project has like different fonts, like the metaverse project and the design for disassembly has like a, oh gosh, I'm not even a graphic designer. I don't even know the technical terms, but it's very like sans serif straight and narrow kind of font. And then you use something like a Times New Roman for like replay and this one before. And I guess that I would have chosen one and gone with it through the whole thing to kind of like kind of just create a clear through line as to your work. You know, you're you and your your design thinking is still there, but it's expressed in different ways so I would keep for me I would keep the font in a more like let the work do the talking. Unless the song was like a crucial part of how you told the story then disregard what I'm saying but I so that's one thing that I would have changed. One thing I would love to learn more about is the metaverse collection that print that you use. It was such a big part of the final garments, and I felt like in the BTS or mood board or the inspo. I guess I didn't understand where the print came from like this is something that you. I guess I would like to know more the print felt like such a crucial piece of the collection so I wanted to know more about the inspiration behind the print. I guess I could keep going I don't know if you want to respond but one other thing I really loved was the first project that you showed replay. I love that you sold it to a professor and I also loved like when you showed the garment that was using the music video is really cool to see your work out in the world and being worn I think that's really strong and it kind of shows I feel like the first tense of you post school. I feel like I don't know what I get one of my questions for you would be like what what do you want to do do you want to have your own label do you want to. Are you more interested in like being a pattern maker and doing textile or doing textile design or like there's so many different places you could go with this body of work I guess I would love to know kind of like what was your favorite where you would want to take it from here so. Yeah, I would be a fashion, I want to go into fashion design path, like tech. Johnny is great but my passion is more into design itself. Like technical design like production and tech tech stuff. No, just like pure apparel design parts, instead of the tech giant. That's cool. Yeah, in that case, you know, if you do another project in the future. I feel like the more real bodies and real people you can show wearing the garment. That's sort of a step into that direction of like, you're making clothes for people to wear and that's, you know, that's sort of where you want from here. I did want to say the metaverse collection is really cool because as a fashion designer working quarantine. I worked with a lot of people remotely out two minutes left. I worked with a lot of people remotely and we use systems like clothe and other 3D draping systems during that time where we couldn't even be in the same room. We're working patterns together or draping together and so this, I definitely feel like it's the future and to have these skills coming out of school is going to be really beneficial for you.  Thank you so much. This is amazing. I was thinking some similar things and I saw some really wonderful feedback in the chat. I think I saw the ideas of using everything and not wasting materials is very beautiful to people and I personally loved how you thought about the whole life cycle of a lot of these like whether it was the life cycle of a material or the life cycle of a garment. That seems to like find its way into your work in a lot of really wonderful ways. So thank you so much and Becca. Thank you so much for your awesome feedback. So next up we're going to speak to Nidhi Malpani. Nidhi is a high school student, also in Austin, Texas, and I am going to share my screen and Nidhi I will give you access. Hello. Hi, my name is Nidhi. Like Kristen said, I'm Nidhi. I'm currently a senior in high school in Austin, Texas. So my first piece is an illustrated map. I created an illustrated map with like electronic hand drawn icons about my currency, which is basically the place I get my strength from in Spanish. The map is related to something that makes me me just to name a few items. The lighthouse is to represent my parents. The Ferris wheel is my sister and the boats represent my close friends and the butterflies show my adoration for butterflies. The next piece is a typography that I did using pickled beetroot. It was inspired by all the stains that I have spilled on my shirts and have ruined them. I was just kind of my inspiration for this was obviously the stains and I used beetroot and cut it up using a knife into a letters and made stamps using them. The third piece is Eagle. This I was in the Cooper Hewitt National High School design competition with two other high schoolers across the country and we won first place. So this is called the Eagle, which is basically an addiction recovery and self care app. The next slide will play a video which will go through the app and it's a snippet from the actually the competition. Hannah has been using Eagle for quite some time. She receives encouraging reminders from her rose whenever she opens the app. She customized it this way so that some of her friends wouldn't see an notification and question it because she's not ready to ask for their support quite yet. She loved how much Eagle valued and ensured her privacy and comfort. Her plant is still happy from yesterday and her butterflies make her smile. Look at that wonderful progress. She got her log as she reflects on the day. The goal she set last night was accomplished. Her eating disorder made the progress slow and set small but they were set nonetheless. Her meal, water, and sleep numbers made her realize just how tired she was. But she got her in the bed and drank the loss of water. How does she forget to drink water all day? Maybe because she was so focused on not drinking alcohol. There. That's better. She decides to aim a little higher for tomorrow's whole. Hannah then goes to the journal and fills out the palms. The last question is her favorite. It's always so nice to focus on the positive. When she's switching back to check on her rose, her heart aches a bit to see it will no matter how slightly. She glances up to her desk just in time to see the change. How well? Tomorrow would be better. When she turns back to the app, the simulated sun has set as well. She goes to her community to check on her fellow companions and is very happy to see her friend, Bababio Marchelli, doing better. It's wonderful when people that share your struggle do well even when you're not. She can start checking in on her other community but since it's been a good couple of days for that addiction, she moves on to check on the butterfly garden. This is her favorite part of the app so she always congratulates a couple users before going to sleep. She's always excited to wake up to a congratulations notification from another user so she wants to give that to others. The next day, she texts Ebony, a friend she called yesterday, and they decide to go on a walk together. She can't believe the progress she's made since starting Ago. The daily reflection and encouragement keep her motivation high when she wants to fall back into her old habits of starvation and isolation. Calling a friend is more than she could have imagined weeks ago and look at her now. On their walk, on the side to show Ebony, her butterflies in the augmented reality camera. As they watch them settle on benches and branches, she suggests Ebony gets the app as well for their caffeine addiction. It helped her, why not others? Ebony agrees. This is something that I didn't mention earlier. Basically the app runs on an emphasis part of it. The idea is that for some people it's easier to take care of other things than it's to take care of yourself. So along with the app, the app can be paired alongside a physical mechanical plant that can be placed on your desk and that's synced with the app. Basically if you're not doing so well, if you had a bad day yesterday that you logged in to the app, the flower will look a little drooped, which could be shown in the video when Anna, our fake person who was going through the app, wasn't doing so good. So the flower drooped and thus the physical plant also drooped. Yeah, so this is just a quick wireframe. And this is the background work in our user journey and our drafting wireframes. The next three pieces are covers. Their book covers a while back. I used to make book covers on an online ebook platform. So these are just three that I've made. The one on the left is one that I actually used my own personal photography and I edited it. The last one is another book cover. This one was actually published by an author. She's a neurologist and these are the book just can, which is short stories that contain the cases that she sees on a daily basis. So this project span over multiple months and went through many iterations. And that's all. Thank you so much, Nidhi, and congratulations. It's wonderful to have a national or a national high school design competition winner in our midst tonight and also you can find out more about the competition in the chat. My colleague Cecilia added more so over to you, Tosh. Yeah, congratulations on this. I think it's amazing that you're in high school and you do all this. I didn't even realize there was like design being taught in high school so I'm absolutely surprised and think your work is wonderful. So let's just start with the map, the Querencia. Probably not pronouncing that correctly, but I love how it's just so expressive. It doesn't look like a personal piece. You would think a personal piece, it wouldn't have this quality like it, you know, there's a naive quality and I mean that and the best intention there's something naive about it, which is difficult to do there's like the perspective is wrong and it's like a Disneyland map but in a really positive way like I think to do something simple and to really express like these places and lands and you know like like buildings and you see the oceans like it's just really fun and the colors are just as fun.  So I mean, I think it's wonderful. So let's go to the next piece. I think this is like everyone's favorite like it's so like simple is really really difficult to do. And what's great about this is the idea is just so straightforward. In today's world where like digital is the first thing you go to, just to see someone in high school, or the opposite way go analog and just just it's really like the imperfections that make this beautiful right like the way the beat juices absorbed it's not evenly absorbed throughout the whole font, and then the font itself has all these imperfections in it. But it's really expressive like that's the one thing you can't get or that it's difficult to achieve in like the digital media is it's so cold and sterile, like just something like this is just wonderful to see. And, and then just even the color like it's like to get that color is, you know, like just even going from like sort of the dark area to a lighter area just has it has tone and texture. I mean, it's just great. The one thing I would add is, I would love to see an expansion of this like I want to see it apply to something. And, you know, like maybe you do like I know you've done the book covers but maybe it's like, I mean this is the obvious thing to do but a cover for a cooking book, you know, like maybe this is the font on the cover and maybe it's like, and maybe the font is the main design of the book jacket right so it's not like this font is over image, but it's like this font that is like sort of sort of the hero design conceit of the whole book jacket but I would, I would definitely add something like that because then it also you also get like your thought process so it's not just sort of this one off like be like cool font but like let's just see how it's applied and, and, and I think that's what's great about your work is you really see that there's a lot of thought process. So I think just by adding a book jacket to this, I think it'll just sort of complete your sort of thought exploration on this piece. All right, let's go to the next one. I this piece I'm surprised like this is, you know, like, like three four high school students who created this because this is super ambitious this has like what it has like you I has packaging and has branding and it's like tag social. He has just a ton of different disciplines and each of them are difficult to master in of itself right but you're like you're trying to tackle it like you have no fear at this point like, I guess that that's what's great about being in high school you just think you can do everything which you should think that way and you just attack it, which is fantastic. One thing I think we talked about this before the first time we met is, there is the packaging component to this. And I think that's one thing I'm missing is you talk about this physical flower but you talk about it later in the presentation like I want to see it upfront right like you should have equal weight with this UI. So, that that's the one thing I think it comes in too late, and that's another opportunity to design something right design the package for this product itself. So, if anything, I would definitely at that. As far as like the thought process in this like in design there's always, you know, the people who think up who think conceptually, and those who actually can create and execute right and the best people are the ones that can do both. And I think you're kind of in that line where you can see the thought process and you want to tackle these big issue. And, and, and also you're able to just just looking at that map you created you can express these ideas and like these are really difficult conceptual ideas that that can be difficult to express in a very simple direct way. And I think that's the beauty of this is you're able to do that you able to like cut through all of this stuff and just get to the point and really articulate what needs to be articulated is, you know, you're helping out someone with addiction and what better way is to use empathy and have them, help grow this plant. So I think just from a perspective of just tackling a problem is really smart.  But, and to be honest, like, I don't know how to judge a high school portfolio because we usually look at college student portfolios and, you know, the one thing that is different is, you know, the focus, which I think maybe you probably shouldn't have the focus when you're in high school to explore and just think of big ideas think of the, you know, biggest possibilities. And then I think once you get into high school, or I mean once you get into college the thing that happens is you sort of find a lane, whether it's like I want to get into 3D and then people just start focusing on that or I want to be an illustrator or I want to be in branding.  And I think what makes your work, your design strong right now is like you do have that you want to tap into the UI you want to tap into illustration you want to tap into typography and those are, you know, three disciplines that you can fully focus on and be an expert in each one of those right. So, so I love sort of like your, your, your ambition and just thinking of like these huge ideas and just not being afraid to tackle them. All right, let's go to the next page. Yeah, or just the previous page. So, like this page I wouldn't like if you're going to show this page I would make sure that it's, there's, it's a little bit more clear like I'm not sure what's happening here. I understand it's a wireframe, but like maybe show sort of like the, the wide shot of this but then you go into the details of what you're doing. So, I at this point, unless you really like start focusing in on what each of these sketches being I would probably leave this out. Okay, let's go to the next one. And see I just love how you're exploring the typography in this. It's like, I mean just going just looking at the overall portfolio just the way you, you choose your typefaces it's interesting like it's. I love that you made your own typography and I love that you're customizing typefaces. I love that you're taking your own photos because it's easy enough nowadays where people will just, you know, go online and they find photography. And, you know, that's kind of easy to do right like just find photography and add some really cool font on top of it. But just the fact that you took time and you considered the lighting and like the material and every aspect that goes into design it's like really hard directing your idea and really, you know, like sculpting the idea that's in your head and then that's really hard to do because a lot of times people do just find some cool image and start riffing off of that. And, you know, that's a really easy way to design but to be able to start with an idea and take it through finish. I think that's super commendable.  And, and then just how and the crystal rose like the rose is covering up the type I think that's really nice. So those I think those details matter.  You know, if it was four years later it would, I mean I could take you a little differently but but I do love just sort of your broad range of ideas and style. Alright, so let's go to the next one. This is fabulous. I love the color like this color is really great. It's simple. Get the idea right away. I, and one thing about this is I know just the fact that I've seen your sort of the way you created the beat type. I feel like you should consider the type just a little bit more. I feel like maybe there's something you could do that's, you know, equally expressive with the type phase. And that that I guess that's my biggest critique with this is, it's nice it's it's good. The type is good, but just because I saw that really beautiful type you created I would just explore that a little bit more and consider the type in this and and maybe consider the scale of the type and relationship to the image also. So, because you want to create a little bit of tension, you know, and, and like that's the one thing that that's not necessarily happening with this. And then was this the last piece was yes. Okay. So yeah I mean overall I think you know this is again the work is pretty amazing especially for a high school student. And I just like to know like, like what what what's your next step like what do you, or like which colleges are you applying for. I know what subject you're interested in at this point or do you just want to keep exploring all these different disciplines. I'm interested in just exploring the disciplines. So far, I'm looking at communication design. So you're keeping your options open. Yeah, yeah that's fabulous. Thank you so so much, needy and thank you, touch for that thorough review. We get that question all the time on our end at Cooper Hewitt which is like, what's that balance between sharing that you're a well rounded person that you're curious person and then like the idea of like picking a discipline or a lane and what's the balance like what I've learned from today is that it depends on where you are. And there's so many lovely things about this portfolio so congrats needy and I also want to shout out that maybe also added a collaborative piece and we don't get any work done in, like I don't get any work done in my regular job without other people, and it's so cool that you can work with others so I just thought that was really cool. There were some great comments in the chat if you want to look through. So with that I'm so excited to hand it over to Edwin Flores. Edwin is a student at Design and Architecture Senior High School in Miami, Florida. So over to you, Edwin. Hello, my name is Edwin. I go to Design Architecture Senior High in Miami, and I'm in the architecture program. Today I wanted to showcase exactly what my design process looks like. And that really begins with art. I feel it's important as a starting point for me to delve into art because I get to explore the concepts that I'm interested in, which ultimately help inform my design work. The following examples are pieces that explore the idea of falling further and further from reality into an escapist fantasy. And here I try and practice creating environments that are reminiscent of the real world, but ultimately they are surreal manifestations of different emotions that I feel every day when I'm trying to avoid the real life. And I experiment with creating an atmosphere both literally and as a mood that makes the viewer engage with the space I'm trying to represent. Here's an example of using bits and pieces of the natural world along with these fantastical elements. And I use them to describe the transition between reality and fantasy. And one thing is that this feeling of liminality, transition or transport is at the heart of my design work and is something I always try to highlight. And when I'm trying to design, I use a similar approach with art. I use it as inspiration. And here is an example where I ask specific questions and I use different art to try and visualize what the answers to those questions may be. So in this example, I'm designing a pavilion and one of the questions I decided to focus on is how can escapism be used to cope with stress. And being intrigued with that third question, I then focus it further and try and pick out design elements from other architects or from the natural world or just anything I find inspiration from and things that help inform my piece. In this case, etherealness or the otherworldly designs, otherworldly designs help create a sense of escape from reality. And that's something that was really important for this project on how to avoid stress with escaping reality. And so going into concepts, I wanted to do several sketches of what this may look like. And all of these obviously show motifs from some of the previous artworks that I've done. And then I try and focus it further into something more resolved. In this case, I'm using a sort of net as a cage or a shelter for people to enter, sort of the separation between the real world and then going into this otherworldly space. And there I design what the inside may look like. And it's once again using these motifs that I had explored in my artwork. And the next step is coming up with the conceptual model. And this is a work in progress. But here it's to sort of get this idea of the space and trying to continue on from everything I've built on since the beginning. An example of a completed project going from once again, that entire process back to inspiration. I'm trying to come up with a seating area that helps evoke biofilo. And it's usually where two parties are in conflict, particularly family members that can be able to sit beside with one another in this space. And once again, this project is sort of a vehicle to be outside of reality and to be in this temporary world where two parties that are alienated can be able to reconcile. And that was the idea behind this project. That's a conceptual model, a completed one of what this space may look like. Lastly, I wanted to show an example of a project I had worked with the class me during the summer, which was to design a community space or Miami Dade County public schools. And I wanted to really use these ideas once again, because it's my in public schools, these are often neglected spaces where people particularly children don't feel welcomed because of the lack. I feel the design in the space often lacks the details and often lacks that feeling of comfort. So that's something we particularly wanted to address. And we used the Everglades, which is close to this center in Homestead in Miami, Florida. The Everglades National Park, we use that as inspiration for all of the different designs in the project. And one thing I want to highlight in particular is designing the terrace area outside of the actual community center building. We wanted to obviously create a terrace area where people can not just be able to relax and unwind these and the people working in the space for anybody who wants, who is there, but also to keep sustainability in mind. As you can see the text says rainwater redirected from awnings into cisterns that are collected for irrigation. What that means is that we wanted to design awnings, which are these coverings to redirect rainwater, which is very common in Miami to then go ahead and use that rainwater that's collected into these cisterns and plant and use it to water the plants outside. And right now I'll show you what that space looks like. And that is sort of something impactful for me because we were able to design a space for actual people and hopefully it will be built. And the idea behind it once again is something that I've been exploring throughout the entire design process. Thank you so much over to you, Doris. Great, thank you Edwin for sharing. It's so nice to not only see your work but also hear you talk about it. I think everybody probably knows when you're applying to school, typically you don't have the ability to explain your portfolio to anyone. And so there's a different criteria when applying to school then when presenting your work. But it's nice to hear your insight because that also gives me the ability to give a little more feedback I think. What I first want to just point out is the criteria that we often use when we look at portfolios for architecture schools. I don't know if everyone knows this but you know architecture school for undergraduate professional degree is a five year program. And in that five year we teach the students everything, everything from beginning to end. You can walk in with very very little architectural background because we intend to teach you everything from digital skills all the way to technology and design history theory, etc. So, oftentimes when we look at portfolios we look for diversity I think that Kirsten brought this up before. We look and we'll accept any kind of form of artwork or expression. So, like what you're showing here, everything from painting to sketches are all acceptable but we oftentimes see anything from photography, we see people submit things that are more creative. Recently, we accepted a student who submitted a dance video. Not only were they dancing but I guess a lot tick tock style they edited the video in such a creative way that that to gave us insight into the student and how they see things. Another criteria that we look for is the ability for students to understand things spatially, and to possibly represent them, or to express them spatially so we're not just looking for 2D type of representations flat type of artwork, but something that has depth to it so like this perspective that you're showing is that that there's obviously an understanding of volumes and spaces that we think in. We also look in the drawings for, and I know this is kind of odd, but for capability for grit and hard work, which is part of like detail oriented which I think you show a lot if you go to your, the beginning with your paintings. You can see that a lot in your paintings because there's an amount of detail, and you can see how painstaking it is to finish these drawings. And that hard work that it takes to get there as opposed to which is different a sketch right which, in some people's cases could be turned out very quickly is a lot of half hazard is more conceptual versus something that's a very complete type of work. There are basic graphic skills to because we're looking for sensibility if a person has that kind of sensibility in that graphic skill. And I think this image here is a good example is how one might compose a drawing painting or or image even a photograph right is the composition. On a natural level it doesn't again have to say be taught graphics on how you use fonts and you may added notation. Oftentimes from Photoshop or illustrator from other types of means or even handwritten, and that kind of craft to it. I'll talk a little bit more on in some of your images. We look for technique, right. If someone has some ability with the high.  Because it's a very different way of thinking and training if it's 100% digital. And finally, what I would suggest for you because you have a storytelling quality about your work is to title your images properly not necessarily in text like in these paintings. But when you submit portfolios I think at all architecture schools right now. So with an image and with that image you can have a title. Sometimes it'll ask for the medium size of it, and then you have a small component that you can write the narration explanation so that can be very very useful for you, especially for these first images that are paintings. So in general criteria, you mean one mentioned I probably looked at about 600 portfolios last spring for admissions class at USC. You have a very, very strong portfolio, I'd say first of all, Edwin. And if you go through your first four paintings I think is very smart and strategic, because I, as far as the quality of your artwork and presentation is probably some of the strongest work, right. So you're a control of the brush, the content, the composition, the colors technique. Those things show that you have an ability to understand what refined work actually should look like. Right. And as we move forward and fast forward through your first four images which I, and I will say, it is nice that you include four of those images because the other thing that it explains to us is that one painting is not just an accidental or the only painting that you have produced. When you when you show four of these paintings basically it's implying to me that these are four of possibly many paintings that you might have right and that you had to make a selection to do that or you mean that is not a one off thing so that actually is quite nice about your paintings. The next few sequence I think is actually quite nice to because you show the process of design, or the process that you went through from, you know, from the beginning inspiration, all the way to your actual design proposal. So I think that's actually quite nice to the dilemma is because the graphics start to change so much. It's hard to know that without you explaining to us that these four images I think it is. We're all part of a package in a single project. So that was a little bit difficult to follow and I don't know if there's something that you can do very simply graphically to tie these four images together. So, for example, very simply, it could have been a specific you mean green color outline, right, at the edge of these things that show us that that is one sequential project. That would help, because the quality of the images start to change but is only once I realized that these are four sequentials where I realized that that the reason why they're changing is because a project is developing further and further along. I think the sketches are great, because they're very sketch like very different than your paintings. I think the, you mean the added text on here makes it also adds to that text component. And then when you scroll forward. It gets more and more refined, which is nice and and and in these last ones is nice because you start to show your ability to draw in section what we often do in architecture and elevation you show me some plan metric views, which is nice to again we don't expect anyone to actually do that. Because what you find in first year in architecture school is that is exactly what we teach you so even if students don't present anything architectural in their portfolio, we will still accept anybody who even showed even like the previous two portfolios that we saw which could be fashion design or graphic design to so because we intend and plan to train everyone architecturally afterward, but you have a little more of a background so it's a little different. So if you keep going to the next image here. So this is so so the good thing about this image I really like and I'll compare it to another model later down is that you presented it very cleanly. The lighting is nice the background is is jet black shadows, you mean, and high contrast is there. The dilemma is what this is not showing is a good level of craft right craft meaning your edges aren't lining up very cleanly. It seems extremely sketch like, and I'm not sure what if this is informing or adding to your previous sketches. I asked you and this might be useful for everyone else I asked Edwin to actually present 15 images because I thought it would be useful for everyone to understand how to also edit out pages or images that are unnecessary right that really aren't helping them. And so in Edwin's case in this case I know you built a model and probably took a long time and it's very very difficult because of the shapes and stuff like that and typically I have to say. If we do this in architecture school we use it with a lot of computation help because I don't know anyone who can actually do this by hand. So, so it's probably just not helping you to show this image so you may want to eliminate this one. If you go forward to the next set of this, you know me so so the next set to as I said before is the one big piece of advice is to make it clean and sharp. The only great criticism I'd have for this part is that it'd be nice if it wasn't so yellowed. So if you have the ability to use Photoshop or anything like that to just make it a higher contrast so it's not a yellowed out drawing. If you keep going forward to the next two I know we don't have a lot of time here. I assume that the perimeter, the perimeter stuff is supposed to be plants and trees. Is that correct, Edwin. Which I think is really smart to do in a model form because it's really hard to build plants and trees, but, but you will find when you get to architecture school, you don't want to draw your model. So in your previous drawing, where you actually draw the plants and trees very similarly. So as we are, because drawings are more aspirational. You mean you could have included real plants and real trees or better you mean drawing, you mean you could have drawn the trees and plants a little better here and not draw your model because what you're trying to show us what the final project is supposed to be about. You're not doing drawings of your model. And then finally, I think your last project and I'll go through this real quickly. I think the, I think this project actually probably would have been better off in your essay and for you to talk about it as an experience then actually show the drawings, because as a graphic and you mean for architecture school, it's not necessarily helping us it's not showing, you know, you mean, these, you mean your innovative ideas, you mean it's basically showing us an architectural project that is what we were, you know, what we will teach you in school. You mean at a much more advanced level. So these last projects is up to you really if you want to include it if anything I would maybe only include this page and eliminate all the images afterward. And then we'll teach you how to do perspectives technology of the rain, you know drainage is, you know, in a much more advanced level we will cover all that kind of stuff. And so it's almost a little too elementary, probably to put in here as one of your 10 pages that you want to submit. So, I think overall it's a fantastic portfolio Edwin I know that it may, I don't mean to critique it, you know me in any, you mean mean way but in a very, very clear way for you to be able to then walk away and have some clear understanding of how to improve your portfolio. But I will say, again, for everyone else out there. Edwin does have a really nice architectural background before entering, not an architecture school. I think the majority of our students who apply or applicants do not have any architectural background and we don't require whatsoever in our in our portfolio reviews. Thank you so much Doris and thank you so much Edwin. You really you spilled the secrets I feel like Doris which was very helpful and I'm seeing in the chat Edwin. You know, someone just wanted to state how well you explained all of your concepts and how they can tell that you're really impacted and connected by your work and I would agree I think you're a great storyteller and I loved seeing that story come to life. So thank you both so much. So we're going to scoot over to Katarina King, who is at North Carolina State College of Design in Durham, North Carolina and is in school for landscape architecture and her reviewer will be Mia Lair who will introduce herself. Hello. I, I met Katarina last week. So, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. I was actually in Dallas on a site project and ended up having a little time so thank you. We're, I'm a landscape architect in Los Angeles, and we. We are. We're excited to see the next generation of people going into landscape architecture. And of course, I believe I believe one of the jury members for Cooper Hewitt this this year was none other than Kofi Canon, Conan that was that is with North Carolina State. And I personally studied environmental design at Tufts University, not knowing that any that I thought it was either architecture or planning that you could study. I didn't know that other professions existed. So I was very pleased to, to find out that landscape architecture was a sort of a line of study and a profession by just seeing drawings up on a wall. Beautiful, beautiful eight foot long drawings for the competition for Central Park. That were was won by Frederick Law Olmstead. And so I recently visited them those drawings and they are still beautiful. And so that's how I got into the profession. And I ended up have doing three and a half years at Harvard. So, from Central America from El Salvador, and I moved to California of 38 years ago. I'm looking forward to this conversation and review. Thank you, Mia. And hi everyone, my name is Katerina King. I'm currently in my third and final year of the master of landscape architecture program at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. I wanted to start by introducing a little bit about my background, as well as the core design goals that carry through all of my projects. I have a bachelor's of fine arts from the University of Colorado, and I included this map of my personal geography to illustrate all the parts of the country that I've lived in for an extended period of time. Living in these different regions has had a major influence in the way that I think about space and the qualities that give a place it's unique character, particularly through the influence of climate and water. When I discovered the profession of landscape architecture, I was drawn to the fact that it really marries a lot of my interests such as art, geography, architecture and natural systems. And so while each site has its own set of considerations, the diagram on the right illustrates some of the core concepts that influence each of my designs, including how well it functions as an ecological system, how it contributes habitat and supports local biodiversity. And of course how it serves and benefits the community. And so I'll be sharing two projects today. The first is an urban context at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. The goal of this project was to redesign the existing courtyard to improve its ecological function, while also serving as a creative space for museum patrons and the surrounding downtown community. So this is my proposed master plan. This design centers around a central planting concept with various spaces to gather or play. And returning to those core design goals. These are some of the components that support biodiversity ecology and community benefit, such as natural learning environments and native plant communities. And so this is a closer look at the planting concept and how it functions as green stormwater infrastructure for the space with water making its way to the lowest fire retention cell. As part of an initial analysis I conducted solar studies that helped to inform an understanding of site microclimates as well as which plant communities might thrive. And because the project was completed as part of a design development and construction documentation studio, I created a set of construction documents. So these are just some excerpts of some of those details, including a materials plan, isometric views and sections. So the second project I'm sharing jumps scales to a more rural context. This studio worked with community partners in Lenore County and the coastal plain of North Carolina. Lenore County is located along the Neuse River, and as such it has faced the continued challenge of flooding due to upstream development and extreme storm events. Some efforts have been made to mitigate the impacts of flooding through a FEMA funded buyout program that has helped to move people out of the floodplain. But the challenge now is that the county is an ownership of an excess of vacant land and no real management strategy. In addition the county is also bracing for a planned future highway bypass project, which is expected to route travelers away from its economic center. So for this project, I considered ways to address both of these challenges. I started by conducting a watershed scale analysis, which looked at things like historic and current land cover impacts, and that identified priority native plant communities to help inform potential restoration areas. I then narrowed my scope to an area that includes a number of vacant and fragmented buyout parcels. What I ended up discovering is that the planned bypass route could actually serve as an opportunity to connect these parcels into a continuous stretch of open space. So once I made those connections I looked at ways in which the historic wetlands and tributary channel could be restored to a healthier state. So this is the final site concept plan, which proposes a 177 acre wetland park with various opportunities for recreation. One of the main connecting features is a proposed new bicycle and pedestrian greenway trail that would run through the park and tie into the county's larger transportation plan. So the intention with the programming is to support a variety of users including school groups that may be on a field trip, travelers who may be on the way to from the coast and of course the surrounding county residents. This perspective illustrates what a restored flood plain wetlands might look like and how it may be experienced through boardwalks in a greenway. This perspective illustrates the new greenway trail alongside restored wetlands, gathering and picnic areas and interpretive signage. This aerial view shows an area of the park that can support educational programming through a new wetland education center, outdoor classrooms and areas for community agriculture. And finally, I wanted to include this slide to show how the project doesn't just end with the design proposal. Rather, it seeks to align itself with potential funding opportunities and partnerships to give the county stakeholders the tools that may be needed to consider project phasing and implementation. And with that, I'd like to thank you so much for your time today and turn it back over to Mia. Thank you. Good. So you want to start from the beginning. So, um, you want to go back to the beginning project. And so we could go really did do appreciate that when you went from did a scalar strategy that term exists. And I think what I what I would say is that the drawings are very, very nicely done. They read well, I think they they're labeled. One of my pet peeves is scale.  I think I do do think that you're, is there drawing before this slide before this yeah, I find I think that you're, you know, basically the roots of your projects, having this diverse biodiversity community and ecology at the, you know, at the heart, I think is really a good way to proceed and process the, the whole effort of a design and plant, you know, and planning and eventual implementation. I, I, I think it may that there, there is something obviously I'm just wondering, can you go to the next one. You know, again, I'd like how you've used some of your, your, the images. I think some of this, your, your, the graphics are in quick clean extremely controlled, and they're really nice. But it's kind of hard to see, even, you know, unless you're projecting but most of us are seeing things on, and I have a pretty big Apple screen here. You know, just large, the larger is better, I think, even in terms of what's the, you know, what, what is be bomb and, you know, what's that all going to feel like, or instead of, you know, perhaps as a, as a, as a graphic to actually start putting some of the images, having the images of the plant material interface, interconnect with each other so you can almost imagine the section.  This is not that familiar with our, all our graphic styles and he could be interviewing and edit a firm, only at private firms but if you were to be interested in, let's say, working in, in the public sector, or, you know, like in an agency, it's a nonprofit. And I think it, you know, these circles are hard to understand so you have to be thinking about who's going to be looking at the, at the project sheets that they, you know, you're, what's the goal at that point. And for me, it's, this is fine, but, you know, I actually want to encourage people also to look at, you know, opportunities in the, in the public sector and nonprofits, because we all need good clients and we to, we need to pepper the world with our, with our knowledge and our skills as landscape architects, because we're in such a, you know, we, what we do is so critical given sort of climate change. So, that I like the solar summer solstice and the winter solstice, I think it's a little light, graphically, a little darker would be better. So, can we go to the next one.  And that you're interested in that, that aspect of, of the profession which is, you know, basically making, making three two dimensions become three dimensions in a reality so I think that's what you've done here is really nice. It helps when, when, when you, you know, start as a young person in a job whether again private or public sector. And once you have something like this you could start talking both to the civil or structural engineer but also to the cost estimator starts, you start thinking that way right Oh, you know, am I on budget or what's my budget and have, you know, and so start understanding the that piece of the work. And when one thing that I think is really would be interesting to see and maybe you have it somewhere is drainage in a project like the urban scale that second project. You know, you could have a sheet where you have drainage, hardscape, planting and softscape identified in, you know, three different sort of stones of gray so you get a sense with the drainage is obviously with arrows, you know, what is your plan, how are you going to get the water into those water waters, you know, green growth water systems that you want to sort of make visible. And the end so I think these maps are really nice. The darker one reads more back more reads easier than the lighter one, and I do have a very bright Southern California sun hitching hitting me right now but the, again, the text is hard to the text on the legend is hard to read. Maybe you can make it, can we make it bigger here. But I just, all I'm saying is that when you're sharing these, you always have to be thinking of that. Sometimes people, you know, could be that you'd be talking to somebody who was in some, in some truck in in Africa who you're thinking of working for and you know, they have a small screen right. So, the, the darker map reads really well. I like very much this idea of these sort of the plant communities as you're thinking of them, the, the swamps and the, you know, Pete landed. I mean I think that's really nice. And you're very disciplined about in control control your scale so ever, you know, I would urge you to go bigger on some of the in this particular map. If you could see the, you know, the swamp, the swamps and the hardwoods and just a little bigger. I think it would be help, it would help to understand better what what this, this country looks like. And as a matter of fact, I would have maybe included a map, an aerial or a map of, or a, what is it, some kind of an aerial photo of the site. Before you enhanced it just so we get a sense of what does that place feel like and maybe doing it in a slight axon so you get a sense of the place. And really interesting to see the, you know, the agriculture and all the aspects of how the site is used. I mean, is, you know, how what it, what it is now. I, I, when I was at the GSD, we had classes with Ian McCarg and Jack Dangerman where in a couple of people from the south who were start who were the first to do really nice aerial photography work. So, I think that, you know, the process that you go through to get here is something you could share, right, a nice aerial and nice accent. Okay, next. I can move to Q&A in about a minute if that's okay with you. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, it's a, I think this is really helpful again scales always a nice thing to have like what's an acre or what's 1000 feet on all of your plans, just it'll help you get sense of scale and it helps everybody else if you're, if you're a client, if you're a client, you know, you want to know the scale next year. And this, you know, this deserved a lot more attention, but I got going on other sites, but I imagined that you actually thought very carefully just by virtue of the drawings how, you know, wealth thought through a, they are as you placed your program on basically topography and also water and water movement and how you want it to program the site and I think it reads really nice. It's a little, the black is a little, it's a little hard to get used to but I like it a lot, and you do have a scale there. I'm so pleased for that. So, nice park, maybe one day we'll all go see it, huh. I hope so. Thank you so so much. Yes, that's great. I think we really saw gamut of people in different just an array of design journeys today so I really appreciate ending on that one. Someone who's, you know, a little further along and in graduate school so it's really amazing to see and something that I sometimes think we don't see a whole lot of it which is landscape architecture so I really appreciate it. So, I wanted to open it up to folks and it seems like other people sort of have have begun. What questions do we have about building a portfolio now that we've seen for amazing portfolios. And, you know, I noticed a question in the chat and in the q amp a box which was from Wilson which was about your website versus your portfolio and that kind of got me thinking we're all here in this kind of virtual space. And like, how has digital changed the game when it comes to portfolio building Doris I know your first portfolio was in a record box right. And, you know, what is what's the biggest difference in terms of how we build a portfolio virtually and what things should we keep in mind if we're building a virtual portfolio. And I'll pass it over to Doris since you're here. Yeah. Well there's, you know, I think that's a tough question because the format is dependent on the, the receiver I guess. So, in terms of getting a job and architecture for example, in offices website is actually a good format, and people can actually move through it. In other cases, it is a PDF that you can actually share which I think in some those cases is more like work sampling. And it's oftentimes easier if you're emailing people that they can just refer to the PDF as opposed to go to a link and navigate which is one more step and I think it deters people from looking at it. So in terms of applying to school for both undergraduate and graduate school and architecture. It's usually individual image uploads. So it could be an individual video or it could be an individual I believe, probably like a JPEG. And so in those cases you have to have all the images right sort of like Edwin showed. Like about approximately 1012 images that you can upload. So it's a different depending on the deliverable and who your audience is of that format. I think Kirsten was talking about in the, in the olden days, when we were young we didn't have the digital medium so we actually had to build and make our own portfolios all the way down to the cover, and how you presented and how you changed the page and things like that is different now. In other cases too I've seen also students are very clever, and they make these apps, right so that you can actually use on a phone and they make these like magazine apps for the phone, and other methods too so I'd say for most students I'm afraid of being clever or resourceful or creative with that, that portion too because that also is very inexpensive. Can I just add one more thing to which I think was really important. You know we don't expect people to have or spend a lot of money on their portfolios. The great thing because they're digital now. You know we look for even you mean people who can hand sketch, who can you mean paint murals who can do all kinds of things that don't require a lot of money and funding and so don't feel compelled that you have to spend a lot of money on your portfolio. We're looking for people who put time and thought into it. So that I think is really critical. And I would say another sort of fat. Something else I discovered is that it's really important for people to be able to write. So if you can in Katarina expresses herself so beautifully to be able to write a paragraph, or a letter about to pitch your project is kind of, it's very useful. We've had people who don't know how to write letters.  And so I think that's important. I think the idea of just having hand sketches, unless you really are the type was going straight into, you know, the digital, digital design, you know, tools, if most a lot of people are still doing a quick idea or quick set of sketches. That help them on, you know, lead them to, to the next level so I don't think it's unreasonable to to have some sketches. Yeah, and it's important I mean I think we all saw that when we saw a nitty beat type you know like that just that hand quality of something can feel really important and it's in it's important not to forget about that, even though it's easy to I think. Yeah, here's another one that's really great and I think this one could be for Becca or Tosh. I think it's so beneficial to practice sharing a portfolio with a friend or mentor, how would you recommend doing this, especially asking for advice for maybe someone you admire but don't know yet like, is it a cold email, you know, do email hello at company, what is what does that look like. The question is, say, what was the question.  Yeah, how would you recommend asking for advice maybe from a friend or potential mentor. Well, I think mentors are absolutely important to have, and you should everyone should seek mentors out. I feel like, you know, at our studio we have a mentor program where we align like more senior level people with some of the junior level people.  Like, with needy I would love to like keep in touch with there and then help her along through her college career and then like when she graduate so just just just keeping in touch with the people that you come across. And just once in a while saying hello, I think it's very important because you never know like you might not end up in the same field as I am. And but everyone knows each other I know a ton of people in sort of different fields but still sort of connected to the same line. And it seems like, especially in LA, a lot of people know each other right, but but don't be afraid to reach out you should just try. And you know, all you're going to get is a no words right. Yeah, I'll get you to that. I would say also. It's hard for me to say that I would actually you know views, if you sent an email to info at studio MLA, can you please, can you let it be really hard to to think how you would get to to that place. But I think, at a lot of the conferences, whether it's a la, there's usually a, you know, air, or a lot of the universities have also peer reviews, or just reviews of portfolio reviews and it's really nice. And I always stop by those and I always volunteer for it during SLA for two or three hours, you know, two of the days, just to, you know, give people advice. And can you tell us what ASLA stands for just for the folks. I'm sorry, American Society of Landscape Architects. The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects is really strong also. And the Urban Land Institute, and then, and then there's the Landscape Architecture Foundation, who also a few where to go this year it's in national, I think. I of course, want to want to go to the voice while I'm there. To the competition and music competition singers. By the way, I also, I actually think that that we really like to watch the voice. And I always find it very wonderful how and would want to think of a way that we could do it in the design community, where you get a group of people and people present and then there's this really conversation with advice, you know, so it's not just advice to you but you're listening to the advice that other people are giving to the people you're competing with. And it's just fantastic as an experience. Yeah, so yeah the American Society of Landscape Architects does at every conference, we have one of those, you know, basically, half day every day of the conference there is a student basically portfolio review. Great. And Becca, does that kind of hold in your world as well are there opportunities to kind of reach out to folks or put your work in front of people. Yeah, I was thinking about this question because I get emails all the time from students or people and to be honest, when is this a cold call email, it's honestly kind of hard to respond to everyone and like BMS and stuff.  We chat and then you email me then I like, oh yeah that's that person who was talking about sustainability let me like follow up. It just helps like kind of cut through the like the anonymous email. I think in person like showing face is a really great way to meet people that you are inspired by and you seek advice from stuff. Fantastic. Well, I think that's a great note to end on I know that we've been together a little longer than we anticipated and I wanted to thank, you know, Edwin, maybe Doren, Katerina and all of our amazing reviewers for all their work and also for all of you. The chat tonight was so valuable and we'll share that with you all. If you shared your portfolio today, we hope to be able to do a lot more of these and, you know, please be in touch with us and our team. And we'll keep conversation going. So thanks for spending your Tuesday night with us. Thanks everyone. We have a design career portfolio toolkit that we're linking in the chat to anybody who might like to learn a little bit more Cecilia just put that in. So we hope that you'll enjoy that too as an additional resource. But thanks all. Have a great night.


Lean more.  That's the beauty of it. They can seriously affect this price. They can seriously affect this price. They could pass a law saying anybody that's traded crypto is involved in black market and they have to, you know, it's illegal to trade crypto now. I don't think they will because BlackRock owns a huge chunk of coin bait. What is it called? I forget what it's called. No, but they can seriously affect it. What happens if all of a sudden there's a cyber attack? Internet goes down. Crypto is going to plummet. Right?  Crypto is going to plummet. You can't trade cryptos if there's no electricity. Right? So there are weak points with crypto. There are weak points with crypto. One thing they can do with crypto because Bitcoin has a footprint everywhere it's been. Right now, they're talking about seizing $300 billion of Russian assets and giving it to Ukraine. They're not really going to give it to Ukraine, except for the big guy.  Right? They get they get to pay for their coffins that they're being buried in. Right? But what they can do also, they can say any Bitcoins that have gone through Russia are now illegal tender, illegal cryptos. Anybody that has any Bitcoins that has gone through Russia is now laundering money for Russia. And you're under threat of being arrested. So all of a sudden, they create two tiered classes of Bitcoins.  What's going to happen then? Right? Who's got what? Right? There are ways that crypto could be manipulated. There are ways that it could happen.


Hi, my name is Fernando and I will be presenting Implementing Grover Oracles for Quantum Key Search on AES and OMC. This is joint work with Samuel Jakes, Michael Nettig and Martin Rotterer. As many of us know, in 2016 the National Institute for Standards and Technologies put out a call to standardize post-quantum cryptography. In this call, they defined five categories specifying the security of a scheme. Countries 1, 3 and 5 are defined based on the hardness to run key search against AES 128, 192 and 256. A fundamental question is then how hard is it to break AES with a quantum computer? The assumption is that AES is an ideal block cipher and that there is no structural weakness that could be attacked, hence the only known strategy is to use Grover's algorithm to speed up key search. Grover's algorithm works by loading the key space of size n on its input register and running about square root n iterations that check whether a key is the correct one for a set of fixed plain-text cipher text pairs. Terminating Grover's algorithm early greatly reduces the success probability of the attack. Since we are going to be talking about quantum circuits, first we should talk about how to cause them. We work with three possible cost metrics in this work. One is the cost or the depth of the circuit. The idea here is that each gate in a circuit takes some amount of time to be executed, hence the depth in terms of gates would be proportional to the time it takes to evaluate it. Another metric is g cost or the total number of gates in the circuit. This means that if a particular qubit is idle at some point it will not have a cost. Finally, we have the depth times width of the circuit. This captures the idea that even idle qubits that are not being operated upon have to be error corrected and this has a cost. If this error correction has a classical cost, this can be used to partially compare the cost of a quantum algorithm with that of a classical one. In other cases, different weights can be assigned to different gates. In particular, if we look at the Clifford plus T universal set of quantum gates, T gates are considered to be more expensive to prepare than Clifford gates. In the case of Grover search, Salka showed that optimally, if we use S machines to parallelize the algorithm, at most we can divide the total depth by square root of S. This differs from exhaustive classical search where the depth is divided by S. This means that trying to run Grover's in less time increases its cost. To have the time, one requires four times many machines and the cost doubles. To capture this, Niez suggested introducing a quantity called max depth, specifying how much total quantum computation can be realistically run as part of an attack. Niez does not relate to the coherence time of the qubits, but rather tries to capture the total amount of computation. Niez then uses the trade-off result by Salka to estimate the cost of breaking AS depending on max depth, based on the total depth D and the gate count G of running an unbounded Grover search against AS. They pick values D and G from graphs at all and obtain the table presented in this slide, that represents the gate cost of running parallel Grover search against AS. Our idea was the following. Niez cares about reducing depth of the attacks, but picks D and G from the analysis by Grassler at all that was instead aimed at reducing the width or the number of qubits used for the attack, assuming no parallelization. What would happen if we designed the circuit to reduce depth instead? In hindsight, parallelization is so bad that minimizing depth is greatly beneficial. To do this analysis, we implemented the AS circuit in the Q-sharp programming language. This allows us to write unit tests for our code, reassuring us that we did correctly implement AS, it's friendly to modify and work on, it lets us automatically estimate the circuit size and allows us to port already existing implementations of AS into the language. We also make the following assumptions. We only work with logical qubits. We don't assume a particular framework such as error correcting using the surface code, and this has two effects. On one hand, we ignore the cost for error correction, or the need to apply gates to physically nearby qubits. On the other hand, we don't get speedups such as free CNOT fanouts. Finally, we assume that swapping values between qubits can be done for free, by not swapping and rather keeping track of the swaps that should have happened. This is not necessarily a realistic model, but it's what the previous literature on Grover against AS had used, and hence also what implicitly NIST was using. So to minimize the circuit depth, we looked at the various components of AS. We started by looking at the S-box. We ported many linear programs to Q-sharp, and we ended up choosing one of Boyer and Peralta's designs that minimizes depth. Also, we've been partially scooped. In partially concurrent and independent work, Langenberg et al. proposed a similar S-box change. We also looked at the fundamental logic gates. The most costly gates seem to be AND gates. Previous work implemented it by using a toughly gate with a specific design. We replaced this toughly gate by a smaller design for an AND gate. This does not work as a toughly gate, but it's sufficient for AS and it's much smaller. Furthermore, it's a joint operator uses measurement base and computation, resulting in an joint operator free of T-gates. For key expansion, Grassel et al. cache some bytes of the round key that are costly to compute, but this is tricky to keep track of while writing the implementation. Instead, we look at in-place round key expansion. We load the key on the input wires, and in place we expand the bytes of the round keys. We can do this on demand so that we only expand as many bytes as are necessary at any amount of time. These results in saving depth with respect to pre-computing the full expanded key, because the computation of the round key can be done in parallel to the round. We also look at mixed column, and instead of doing a PLU decomposition as Grassel et al. do, we chose a recent design by Maximov that results in a shallower but wider design. Finally, we also fix a mistake that Grassel et al. make in computing the amount of plaintext ciphertext pairs required to uniquely determine an AS key. We also consider unbounded lower probability attacks by using less pairs. We're now looking at the cost reported by Grassel et al. in 2016. No parallelization is being considered. This column indicates the number of plaintext ciphertext pairs that we have. This one indicates the number of qubits that we have. These indicate the number of gates used, where M indicates measurements. Grassel et al. do not use measurements as part of their Grover oracle, where we do as part of our AND gate. Then we have the depth of the circuit, and here we can look at only T gates, or we can consider all the gates. Then we have the total gate count and the total depth times width of the circuit. Finally, we have the probability that Grover's search is successful. We now include the numbers from Langenberg et al. and from our work, and we'll point out the main differences. First of all, we have lots of measurements in our circuit. Yet we have no reason to believe that a measurement is more expensive than applying a quantum gate. And even though 2 to the 77 is a lot of gates, it's still less than the number of Clifford gates or T gates applied, so we don't believe that this should be a problem. Also, we reduce the number of pairs used, and this has an effect on the success probability of the attack. Finally, when looking at the cost of the attacks, we gain a factor of 2 to the 10 in the T depth, with respect to Grassley et al., a 2 to the 5 gain in gate cost and a 2 to the 7 in depth times width cost. Now, in the previous table, the only attack that could be carried within depth constraints was attacking AS128 within 2 to the 96 depth. For all the other combinations, we'll need parallelization. There are two ways of parallelizing Grover. One is called outer parallelization. Here the idea is that we have AS machines that are running Grover independently, and we stop them early to save square root AS depth. We notice that the success probability in this case can only approach about 91%, and so it's not possible to run a probability one attack by stopping early. An alternative strategy is inner parallelization. Here the key space is partitioned in SD disjoint subsets. Of course, only one of these subsets contains the key that we're trying to recover. Then, we run Grover search on these subsets of the key space. Interestingly, cutting by square root AS the depth will still give us probability one of finding the right key in its own partition of the key space. So this allows us to save square root AS depth and still have a probability one attack. Also, a side effect of inner parallelization is that since we are looking for a key in a smaller subset of the key space, it's unlikely that other spurious keys mapping the same plaintext to ciphertext will be present in the same subset. This means that we can afford running the quantum part of the attack using less plaintext ciphertext pairs. This results in less qubits being required. Now these are costs for the parallelized Grover attack. These two columns show that except for AS128 in MaxLabs2296, in all other cases we use all of the depth budget available. AS is the number of machines that are required to run the attack and W is the total number of qubits required. Here we can notice that these numbers are very big and that in the most extreme case, which is AS256 in MaxLabs2240, a quantum attack might require about 2 to the 200 quantum computers, that of course sounds implausible. And then if we look at the gate cost and depth times width cost, again in the most extreme case we might need executing 2 to the 245 quantum gates. So overall it might result in being more expensive than running classical key search instead. Some observations here should be made. One is that some of these costs are so big that it might mean that no attack exists. Say for example that we have a candidate for a category 5 scheme that does a similar analysis and it results in an attack with gate cost 2 to the 230 in MaxLabs2240. Now this is strictly speaking less than the hypothetical gate cost for attacking AS256. But it is still huge and it might be not practical, just like building 2 to the 197 quantum computers will likely be non-practical. So is this scheme as secure as AS256? In some sense no. But then maybe what these numbers are telling us is that there exists no quantum attack against AS256 and maybe also the numbers from this hypothetical category 5 candidate say that no attack exists, hence maybe it is in category 5. Also we should observe that so far we have assumed that there is no limit to the number of qubits available, but clearly qubits are not free and so maybe we should consider having a quantity maxWidth. The problem is then that if we have both a maxDepth and a maxWidth we might end up in a situation where no probability one attack against AS exists. What happens then is that maybe we should be talking about low probability quantum attacks against these schemes. Finally we have compared the table from the NIST call for proposals with the numbers from our analysis. This is the resulting table. By looking at the approximation column which tries to interpolate the various attacks we can see that we knocked off about 13 bits in some sense of quantum security against AS. Of course these remain highly impractical black box attacks. But at the same time in some sense it means that the proposed quantum schemes are somewhat more secure because it's easier to be as secure as AS. We also did a cryptanalysis of low MC. Low MC is a block cipher family designed for FHE and MPC and it's designed to have low multiplicative complexity. It is used as part of the picnic digital signature submission and since key recovery against low MC could lead to an attack against picnic we costed groverizing key recovery. We use the same techniques and end up having costs that are superior to AS due mostly to the bigger key expansion circuit and so to the best of our knowledge low MC is harder to quantumly break than AS in some metric. Talking now about future directions it would still be interesting to minimize depth of the AS s-box and other components. There are some approaches that use a quantum computer to trade-offs width for depth of unitary operators. The problem with these is that the resulting unitary cannot be classically simulated and hence it cannot be unit tested unless a big enough quantum computer is built. Otherwise we could try using classical circuit minimizers. We could also improve the implementation of low MC. There was a new technique presented at EuroCrip last year about shallower circuits but we didn't try implementing it. Also we could redo the analysis in the surface code setting. This max depth analysis could also be applied to some of the quantum attacks against the post-quantum candidates and the same could be done with max width. Finally we should know that our analysis does not cover in any way multi-target attacks. That's all I wanted to say. Remember to like, comment and subscribe and see you at the panel discussion. Thank you.