Get to know us

People and Culture

Look around an IXDIA studio and you'll see something rare in a STEM program: a room that actually looks like the world. Our cohorts are consistently more than 50% women — not as a target we're striving toward, but as a reflection of the community we've built and the culture that makes people want to be here.

Our students come from everywhere. First-generation college students who are the first in their families to pursue a graduate degree. International students who bring global design perspectives and stay through STEM OPT to build careers in the Bay Area and beyond. Minoritized students who have been told — implicitly or explicitly — that tech spaces aren't for them, and who are proving otherwise every semester.

What unites this community isn't a shared background. It's a shared belief that design should reflect and serve all of human experience — and that the best way to build that kind of work is to be in a room with people who don't all look the same, think the same, or come from the same place. At IXDIA, that's not an aspiration. It's just Tuesday.

Our Students

MA IxDIA students are part of Cal State East Bay’s highly diverse, socially mobile academic community. Many come from working-class and first-generation backgrounds, shaping a studio culture centered on belonging, collaboration, and shared growth.

As a STEM-designated program, IxDIA prepares students for careers in interaction design, UX, and creative technology, with applied, project-based learning and strong faculty mentorship. International students benefit from STEM OPT eligibility, while all students gain access to career resources that support professional pathways beyond graduation.

Together, IxDIA students bring global perspectives, lived experience, and interdisciplinary thinking to design interactions and systems with real-world impact.

Our Faculty

MA IxDIA faculty are interdisciplinary designers, artists, researchers, and technologists whose work spans interaction design, creative technology, critical theory, human-centered design, and experimental media. Actively engaged in research and professional practice, they bring real-world insight, mentorship, and intellectual rigor into the studio, supporting students as they design complex interactions, systems, and experiences with social, cultural, and technological impact.

Ian Pollock, M.F.A.
Professor of Art & Design
Director of the Graduate Program

Ian Pollock is a multidisciplinary educator, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of new media art, interaction design, and social justice. He holds an MFA in New Media Art Practice from UC Berkeley and a BFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, and brings over two decades of academic and professional practice to the studio.

His creative work is anything but abstract. Guerrilla Grafters — his project grafting fruit-bearing branches onto ornamental city trees to address food access and sustainability — has been exhibited at the Venice International Biennale for Architecture. BiasMap visualizes global prejudice through spatial data. His interactive installations challenge societal norms and open dialogue on the issues that matter. His scholarship appears in the ACM Digital Library, Afterimage, and Leonardo Journal, and his work has earned the Eisner Prize for Excellence in the Arts and a Wells Fargo Foundation Grant.

In the program, Ian teaches across the full arc of the two-year experience. He leads MM 601 (Seminar in Interactive Art & Design), MM 602 (Project and Story Development), MM 632, MM 665 (Experiments in Interactivity), MM 666, MM 680 (Interactive Content Development & Speculative Design), and MM 640 (Forum) — the through-line course that keeps the cohort connected every semester. If you want a faculty member who connects design theory to real-world activism and hands-on making, Ian is that person.

Gwyan Rhabyt, M.F.A.
Professor of Art & Design

Gwyan Rhabyt is a new media artist and Associate Professor at Cal State East Bay, with an MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts and a BA in Philosophy from UC San Diego. His work spans net art, place-based installation, and media-rich sculpture, performance, and installation — exhibited nationally and internationally.

What makes Rhabyt's perspective genuinely rare: he was experimenting with prototype GUIs at Xerox PARC in 1980, and wiring live performers to analog synthesizers and tape loops in 1984. He's been thinking about interactivity and human-machine experience longer than most fields have had names for it. In the program, he brings that deep historical and conceptual grounding to courses in screen-based design and interactive systems.

Marina Terteryan, M.S.
Adjunct Professor of Art & Design

Marina Terteryan is a multidisciplinary design leader, service design director, and conscious entrepreneur who works at the intersection of service design, behavioral science, education, and social justice. She is founder of the why lab and has partnered with Fortune 500 companies, social enterprises, and NGOs to develop human-centered solutions that are as strategic as they are empathetic.

As an educator, Marina brings real-world design leadership into the classroom — the kind of perspective you can't get from a textbook. She is an instructor at General Assembly and a frequent speaker and advocate in the design community, including as host of the podcast Why Service Design Thinking, one of the first podcasts dedicated to the field.

In the program, Marina teaches MM 683, MM 692, MM 694 (Project Documentation), and MM 640 (Forum). Her courses ground students in the research, documentation, and systemic thinking that separates good designers from great ones — and her work with diverse clients across sectors means she brings genuine breadth to every conversation about what human-centered design can do in the world

Tyler Stannard, M.F.A.
Adjunct Professor of Art & Design

Tyler Stannard holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University and brings an active studio practice to the classroom. His work explores the edges of emerging technology — from video game design and virtual environments to mixed reality and techno-illusionary devices — and has been presented at venues across the Bay Area and California.

In the program, Tyler teaches MM 621 (Screen-Based Interaction) and MM 622 (Physical Prototyping), where students develop hands-on skills in creative coding and the Internet of Things (IoT). His courses sit right at the intersection of interaction design and physical computing — exactly where ideas stop being abstract and start becoming real.

About the Logo

The MA IxDIA logo is composed of two interlocking tesseracts, representing design practice beyond static 2D or 3D artifacts. Together, they symbolize the design of behaviors, systems, and interactions—work that unfolds across time, context, and human experience rather than existing as a single finished object.

The dual magenta and cyan forms reference an anaglyph, visually pushing the logo into an imagined three-dimensional space. This optical tension reinforces IxDIA’s core philosophy: designing for emergent interaction, perception, and meaning that exists beyond the screen or surface.

The logo embodies IxDIA’s commitment to multidimensional thinking, interdisciplinary practice, and human-centered systems design, where art, technology, and psychology intersect.

History

IXDIA has been at the forefront of interaction design and interactive art since 1996 — long before UX/UI had a seat at every product table, and long before "human-centered design" became a hiring requirement. We were thinking about how people experience technology when most programs weren't asking the question at all.

Over nearly three decades and 420+ graduates, our thesis projects have tackled everything from interactive cinema and educational tools to mobile applications, public installations, and speculative design. They are team-based, real-world, and built to go somewhere — not just satisfy a committee. Many have won national and international awards.

What hasn't changed in all that time: the belief that the most powerful design work happens when diverse people with different backgrounds, skills, and lived experiences build things together. That's not a recent value we adopted. It's how this program was founded, and it's how we still run today.