The Secret Lives of Sand Dollars

Roger: Could you introduce yourself and your work as it relates to sand dollars or climate change?

Behnaz: My name is Behnaz Farahi and I am an assistant professor in Design. I’m a computational designer, and a co-coordinator of the Human Experience Design interaction (HXCI) graduate program. A lot of my design practice and research is informed by materials, forms, and intelligence found in natural systems.

Siavash: My name is Siavash Ahrar and I’m an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering. I've been here for about four years at CSULB. My lab is in BME, but besides human health, I really care about planet health and how human health is influenced by changes in ecosystem and emerging climate change challenges. My students and I build tools and toys to study biological systems.

Doug: Hi, I’m Douglas Pace, associate professor of Biological Sciences. I'm a larval biologist, but I'm also a physiologist. I really like to merge those two things together, and I study what I would call developmental physiology. The focal point is the understanding that what we're likely to teach students in a textbook is about adults, which are fairly static in their physiological processes. So when you look at a developing system, it becomes very exciting because homeostasis is not as important anymore. In every moment, a developing organism is changing what it looks like and how it behaves. Specifically with sand dollars, what I've been trying to understand better is how sand dollars will respond while they're developing and the environment around them is changing. We find that there's a huge degree of what we call "phenotypic plasticity." These organisms are very, very sensitive and responsive to the environment around them. Most of these changes are adaptive changes that help them make the right choices within the new environments they're encountering. That's really the basis of my research from a biological standpoint.

Siavash and I started pushing the boundaries of this analysis and really taking it into new areas. One area is the consequences of morphological changes on sand dollars’ hydrodynamic performance.

When the opportunity came for the STEM-NET interdisciplinary grant, both Siavash and I were very adamant that we should bring in someone who can truly make the project interdisciplinary. That's where Behnaz played such a such an important role.

Roger: For those who didn’t come to the exhibit, could you paint a picture of it?

Behnaz: It is an immersive experience design where the audience learns about sand dollars from the larval stage to adult. There are three main stations in the exhibit. Two stations project microscopic information of the the sand dollar larvae and the adults. The third station displays 3D-printed larvae where the audience can interact with them to observe the fluid dynamic behavior. Through the wraparound screens and the speakers of the 360° theater, the exhibit is not just a scientific visualization, but also an immersion into a field of sand dollar larvae in the ocean. Every five minutes, there was one minute of meditation with these creatures.  

Doug: The use of the ISPACE’s 360° theater with the wraparound screen was the key. Visitors were taken from their normal lives and into the world of sand dollars. I think the sand dollar was a great choice of an organism, because most people experience dead sand dollars on the beach and don't know what an live, adult sand dollar looks like. It was amazing to have the immersive environment to allow people into that world. To see a four-foot larva is a dream of a larval biologist! The interactive station in the exhibit really allowed people to get their hands wet and manipulate the organism and see the effects on the larvae by the environment.

Roger: How did you all meet each other?

Behnaz: As Doug mentioned, they were thinking to bring a designer/artist on board. When they reached out to me and I heard about the prompt about sand dollar larvae in an oceanic environmental crisis, I was excited about collaborating with them. I am inspired by nature and am in love with the ocean. This opportunity was an incredible chance to work with a scientist and an engineer to think about innovation in a different way. A lot of times designers or artists work in silos, but I'm really interested in cross-disciplinary collaborations. At CSULB, we have access to incredible resources, including incredible individuals, such as Dr. Pace and Dr. Ahrar.

Siavash: Behnaz and I are both COVID hires. In the first year, it was difficult to connect with people, but I remember sending Doug a cold email. It was probably not even a well written email, but we met and that led to us working together. I've always wanted to work with marine systems. Doug has co-mentored a couple of students from my lab over the years and we're very thankful for it. When the STEM-NET grant announcement came out, we wanted to work with someone really awesome and we're very happy that Behnaz said yes to working with us. It's been really fun and joyful. I like this idea of working with people who are awesome in their own discipline but also very open about working on new stuff. I think what we proposed to Doug at the beginning probably sounded silly or insane, but he was very open to it. He taught us everything we knew, and then we talked with Behnaz about the best ways to showcase the sand dollars.

Roger: What were the roles of your students in this project?

Behnaz: When we got this grant last semester, I decided to take it to my Design 582 class, which is a graduate course on design of experiences. We had about 15 students work on creating experiences addressing the environmental crisis facing our oceans and the living creatures facing those environmental challenges. Some groups worked on coral reefs, some groups were working on issues of whale communication, and one group specifically was working on sand dollars. I worked with each group to create immersive experiences and tell their stories of the crisis these creatures are facing. I worked closely with the group of honors students who were focusing on sand dollar larvae at different stages of their life. We gave the students different colors, textures, and materials, and then 3D printed models of the larva. We also created interactive experiences with other layers of information like Siavash’s study about hydrodynamic behaviors. So, this grant was an amazing opportunity to see how students develop the topic. Through thinking with the students, we managed to put this exhibition together in the spring semester. In a way, it was a continuation of the student group’s efforts.

Doug: That was a lot of important upfront work. My students were largely responsible for ensuring that the live sand dollars were ready to go. That entailed taking care of the adults and spawning them to make the larvae that were in the exhibit, including feeding and taking care of them. By the time the public viewed them, those larvae were already about two to three weeks old. We fed them different amounts of food to elicit the different morphological phenotypes that were so well represented in the in the models that Behnaz was responsible for. That allowed us to talk about the different phenotypes and the hydrodynamic consequences, which is where Siavash’s students were so critical.

Siavash: Doug’s students were also very active during the presentation. They engaged the public and walked them through the exhibit. In the feedback we got about the exhibit, the most repeated thing was that the students were awesome. They worked really hard for it.

Doug: Yeah, it was a growth experience for them. When teaching students how to do research, it's easy for them to be very siloed, as we've said earlier. They really want to focus on just knowing the facts they’re responsible for, but this experience allowed them to understand the connectivity of all the hard work they were putting in. When they delivered that to the public, my students found it to be a very positive experience.

And just so it is said, I think Siavash’s students played a very important role before the exhibit getting these beautiful flow traces that show the hydrodynamics of these larval forms. The changes in morphology gave them a completely different footprint when they interacted with the environment around them. That was a really, really exciting part of the exhibit in conjunction with the beautiful models that Behnaz made.

Behnaz: The hydrodynamic behavior with the fluid dynamics around the sand dollars created beautiful vortex-like pattern. If you look at my work, you can see very clearly that I'm really obsessed with them. I was so excited that this was actually happening in nature at a microscopic scale. It was just fascinating, and I was very excited about this collaboration opportunity as a result.

It was a great opportunity for our students to see that working on a grant is not just about writing a paper, which is part of what we're doing, but it can also create awareness with a larger audience. My students saw that a scientific/engineering problem could be a starting point for experience and exhibition design. I think this is something that is usually less addressed in education, and I think we're very excited to see what our students were able to accomplish.

Siavash: Yes, to add, it's one thing to present your work to colleagues or peers or at conferences, but it's a whole other thing to show up to an exhibition with family members. I was proud of the students, and the data we produced was presented in a really cool way. That that was really joyful.

Roger: I realize that while I love sand dollars, I didn’t really know anything about them. So hat’s off to yourselves and your students. I didn’t even know there were sand dollar larvae.

Siavash: I think the whole feeling of the room was very immersive, and you could be transported away from campus. That was really awesome.

Doug: I want to credit Behnaz for the aesthetics of it all. I laugh when I create a mental image of what the exhibit would look like if it was just me or just Siavash. It would have been very different. [laughs]

Behnaz: I think aesthetics are very important when you're thinking about experience design. A lot of time, designers just design one object and put it in a gallery.  But today, we really have to think about design as a holistic experience. How do people enter the space? What is the vibe that you're looking for? What is the mood? The idea was really to transport people to an otherworldly space where everything is white and looks like laboratory. So they have to cover their shoes. That kind of ritual helps prepare someone to go into a very special space to learn about the world of sand dollar larvae. The white floor was part of creating the experience, preparing the audience for going to this journey.

Roger: To wrap things up, what were your favorite parts of the project? Or is there anything you’d like to share with other faculty related to your experience?

Doug: I think it's great to find ways to talk about what we (researchers) do through different modes of communication. That really is one of my favorite outcomes of this entire endeavor. I think there's a reason why so many scientists are misunderstood and I think people who do scientific research have to work harder to ensure that their hard work is appreciated appropriately. That means we have to rely on some creative ways to communicate what we're doing to the general public and to other colleagues at our university.

Personally, doing this project was very satisfying because, if I may tell a story, my mom used to quilt and I remember when I got my Ph.D., she quilted me a starfish larva. She said, “How is it that the world doesn't know how beautiful these things are?” When we started going down this interdisciplinary road, I was like, "That's exactly right. We do need to get the message out." At this very, very small level that people can't appreciate without the help of microscopes, there is just an incredibly rich amount of beauty out there. 

Behnaz: That's a beautiful story Doug. I want to build on what Doug is saying because I think it's very interesting. If science, engineering, arts, and technology come together, we can have true innovations. I think our collaboration was a starting point of creating awareness through immersive experience design, and I think our future goal is to create innovative outcomes. I also want to say that this collaboration was so wonderful. Collaborations, especially interdisciplinary ones, can also be very challenging because we come from different fields with different terminologies. But I have to say, what was very wonderful about this was that each of us worked together so well and everything was so smooth. So I have to say that I was very grateful to learn and also be able to collaborate with all of you. This was a wonderful experience for me, personally.

Siavash: Yeah, I agree with that. I think I learned a lot, which is why we're here. We also got to share what we have done with others who might have not known about it. It is really cool to be able to do that and I do not take it for granted. I’m very thankful for the team, the opportunity, and the space.