GENSLER BRINKMANN SCHOLARSHIP

Jason Cote, a third year interior architecture and design student in the Fay Jones School, won the prestigious Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship. Cote received one of four Gensler Brinkmann scholarships awarded this year by Gensler, the global design and architecture firm.

For this scholarship, Cote was awarded $5,000 to go toward his education. In addition, he was invited to participate in a two-month fellowship this summer at the Gensler offices in Las Vegas.

“I’m not surprised that Gensler plucked Jason’s proposal from the Brinkmann Scholarship entries and placed him in their highly competitive Summer Research Fellowship Program,” said Carl Matthews, professor and head of the Department of Interior Architecture and Design. “In his video submission, he spoke passionately and eloquently about the importance of research based design solutions. It is a testament to Jason and his faculty mentors that his work is beautiful, meaningful and grounded in research.”

Growing up in Jane, Missouri, Cote was always involved in something creative, including studio art, film, photography, music production, DJing, fashion design, event curation and culinary work. He considered himself a jack of all trades.

After graduating from high school in 2014, he enrolled in college. But he dropped out during the first semester and spent time traveling and exploring life.

In fall 2018, Cote, a first-generation college student, started attending NorthWest Arkansas Community College, taking classes in art, graphic design and architecture appreciation. Then, he decided to pursue a degree in interior architecture and design, and chose the Fay Jones School for its reputation and proximity.

“Once I understood what architecture is and what design is, I realized that it could be my outlet where I use all of these different tools in my arsenal to actually create something — and that that kind of jack-of-alltrades nature played into being the master of this,” he said.

Cote, now 26, has found that interior architecture and design suits him very well for many reasons. Americans on average spend 90 percent of their time indoors — so he feels he can have a significant impact on people’s lives.

“For me, interior design falls in that nice, sweet spot between logic and feeling,” Cote said. “With interiors, I feel like I can create more of a story, a narrative, and create more of a visceral emotional impact on the people that I’m designing for.”

During the fall 2022 semester, Cote and other students were working on a project in a studio led by Jinoh Park, an assistant professor of interior architecture and design. Park nominated Cote and another student to apply for the Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship.

Cote refined his project over several weeks and edited it to fit the prompt, working with another professor in the studio, Michelle Boyoung Huh, assistant professor of interior architecture and design. In late April, he learned he’d won, and that the jury considered him a standout candidate.

“This has been the single most validating thing that my work is meaningful that I’ve ever experienced, by far,” he said. “It’s just super validating that I’m doing something that can contribute to the world on a greater scale, that it’s not in vain or a selfish pursuit or something. There’s actually value in it.”

Cote’s project was a 12,000-square-foot robotics office in Boston, and he used a human-based design approach to design the space. In his design proposal, Cote created different zones within the office space to accommodate the various states of emotion that people go through in a day — nearly 400 emotions a day, according to his research.

“The space really caters to all of the different states we go through instead of the classic, traditional big grid of desks or the isolated cubicles,” he said. “I wanted to create a space that adapted to people as they adapt within themselves.”