A junior at the Grauer School in Encinitas has been awarded an honorable mention in the 2023 National High School Design Competition, officials said Monday.
Aviya Afra, by earning the citation, was among the top 2% of entrants in the contest, presented by Cooper Hewitt, a Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.
This year’s competition theme was “What Would You Design With Data For Your
Community?” The competition had 707 entries from across the U.S., with three finalists and 12 honorable mention awards.
The competition also challenged teens to be creative storytellers who can share powerful information in innovative and compelling ways by visualizing data.
Aviya’s entry, titled “The Loneliness of Aging,” was inspired by one of her favorite movies,
Up, a 2009 Pixar production.
She entered the competition because of her passion for architecture and design, and wrote this description for her entry: “My design brings awareness to the loneliness and isolation epidemic that seniors face. It highlights a story that represents millions of seniors who lack friendship and companionship.”
Her entry included a 4D rendering comprised of two data sets – one showing the amount of time one spends with others throughout a lifetime and the other, a music visualization from a spectrogram extracted from a song in Up, “Married Life” by Michael Giacchino.
She said “the color spectrum correlates to emotions of loneliness throughout one’s lifetime. The blues and purples represent feelings of loneliness and isolation in seniors. My design
brings seniors together, providing them with the comfort that they are not alone in these feelings. It also inspires compassion and empathy in younger generations.”
Classes at the Grauer School that gave Aviya the skills she needed to take part in the competition include Visual Arts, in which she learned how to use the software programs Blender and Illustrator, and Physics, which exposed her to how sound waves and frequencies work.
“Combining STEM and the arts allows our students to connect STEM principles and concepts learned in class with their passions outside of school,” said Morgan Brown, a Grauer Physics teacher. “Aviya is a perfect example of this, as she came to office hours to learn beyond the scope of the standard curriculum so that she could incorporate design elements and artistic practices into the creation of her project.”
The Grauer School requires students to perform community service each year. At 13, Aviya was named the youngest KonMari consultant in the world and is the official teen ambassador for the KonMari philosophy, developed by author and organizing guru Marie Kondo.
As a community service project, Aviya used KonMari techniques to help an 80-year-old neighbor, a project that became a source of inspiration for her design entry.
“She did an incredible amount of work in her free time over the span of several months, solely because she wanted to delve deeper into the process of designing graphical representations to call awareness to an important social issue that impacted her neighbor,” said Alicia
Tembi, Grauer, a Grauer assistant principal. “This is a perfect example of the intrinsic
motivation and project-based learning that allows Grauer students to develop their personal
passions.”
