Look around an IxDIA studio and you will see something rare in a STEM program: a room that reflects the world students are designing for. Our cohorts are consistently more than 50% women, not as a target we are striving toward, but as a reflection of the community we have built.
Our students come from everywhere. First-generation college students, international students, career changers, practicing designers, artists, and technologists all bring different stakes into the same studio.
What unites this community is not a shared background. It is a shared belief that design should reflect and serve human experience, and that the strongest work happens when people with different histories build together.
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 through applied, project-based learning and close faculty mentorship.
International students benefit from STEM OPT eligibility, while all students gain access to career resources that support professional pathways beyond graduation.
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.
They bring research, professional practice, mentorship, and intellectual rigor into the studio, supporting students as they design 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, before UX/UI had a seat at every product table and before human-centered design became a hiring requirement.
Over nearly three decades and 420+ graduates, our thesis projects have tackled interactive cinema, educational tools, mobile applications, public installations, and speculative design. They are team-based, real-world, and built to go somewhere.
What has not changed is the belief that powerful design work happens when people with different backgrounds, skills, and lived experiences build things together.