New Faculty at Hillier College
Hannah Berkin-Harper, Industrial Design
Hannah Berkin-Harper is an Industrial Designer specializing in public spaces and community-engaged design. She comes to NJIT from Pratt Institute where she taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the Industrial and Interior Design departments. She is Design Lead Street Lab, a non-profit that creates pop-up programming and placemaking in New York City where she creates new designs for public spaces. Current projects include OASIS, an outdoor cooling installation that includes misting, plants, and shade for Open Streets She is an Urban Design Forum Rewire fellow, developing new ideas to increase biodiversity in the urban environment. She was a senior designer at Karim Rashid’s studio for nearly a decade, working on furniture, tableware, consumer products and interiors for clients all over the world. She founded HBH Design, a consultancy focusing on projects involving environmental sustainability, working with both private clients and non-profits. Hannah has also taught at Montclair State University, NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her designs have been published in the New York Times, Urban Omnibus, Next City, and Streetscapes for Wellness, a publication of the NYC Public Design Commission. She has been honored twice by Interior Design Magazine’s NYCxDesign Awards.
Hannah’s recent courses include Design Studio II, Design Studio III and ID464.
Examples of her work can be found here: UrbanOmnibus, HBH Design and Streetlab
Erin Truesdell, Joint Appointment, Digital Design
Erin Truesdell is a game developer and researcher whose current work focuses on design at the intersection of play, collaboration and embodied interaction, investigating how the design of physical and virtual reality interfaces can support collaboration and play. She has applied the knowledge gained from her research to the design and development of a number of games and other interactive media, focused on leveraging the potential of play and social interaction to drive behavior change, reflection, and entertainment. A notable example of this is her project Haber Dasher, a game controlled by an enormous bowler hat that has been featured at multiple juried festivals, including alt.ctrl.GDC 2023 and the 2024a nd 2025 MAGFest Indie Arcades. Her prior work includes the development of a new method for aggregating and visualizing creative sense-making data from collaborative play sessions and work on applying game design techniques to behavior change interventions in health contexts.
Erin’s publications can be viewed here, she is currently not teaching an HCAD course.
Hye Yeon Nam, Digital Design
Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist and HCI designer exploring how technology can improve our interactions with other agents - humans, robots, or nature. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon has participated in exhibitions, festivals, and showcases at ARS Electronica Center, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Asia Society Texas Center, Japanese American National Museum, Times Square,Eyebeam, Conflux festival, D.U.M.B.O. Festival, the Lab in San Francisco, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica (FILE), SIGGRAPH, Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI), International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Creativity & Cognition (C&C), and several festivals in China, Istanbul,Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel and LIVE TV show Good Day Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Business Insider, Slashdot, Engadget among other publications. She is currently an associate professor of digital design at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).
Hye Yeon's recent courses include AD463 – Collaborative Design Studio, DD320 Robotics for Architects and Designers.
Examples of her work can be found here.
Sampath Pediredla, Architecture
Sampath Pediredla joins NJIT following an adjunct position at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. She has been a guest critic at numerous institutions, including Pratt Institute, Harvard GSD, Cornell, and Columbia University. In her professional career, she has acted as a designer and project manager at various architecture and interior design offices in New York. Her research interests lie in exploring new and emerging technologies within the Building Information Modeling (BIM) space and their implications on design, representation, and academia.
