Conlan Olson and Noah Toyonaga will present Pattern Magic, a pipeline that converts more than 60,000 historic 2D sewing patterns from the University of Rhode Island’s Commercial Pattern Archive into accurate 3D garment reconstructions. The project will publish an interactive repository and toolset that lets historians, artists, and educators explore and reuse both the original patterns and their digital models.
Pattern Magic is funded by a Magic Grant from the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a collaboration between Columbia University and Stanford University.
Conlan Olson is a PhD student in computer science at Columbia University advised by Professors Toni Pitassi and Rich Zemel. They study social aspects of computation, focusing on algorithmic fairness, privacy, and applications of computational methods to the humanities. Their background is in math, theoretical computer science, and education.
Noah Toyonaga is a physicist and artist. They earned their PhD in physics from Harvard University in May 2025. They are drawn to the mysteries and delights of the everyday, which they explore, and try to explain, through theory, computation, and experiment—driven by geometric intuition. Their doctoral work reflects upon the genius of nature (the fatal mechanism of viral infection), the wisdom of craft (the fecundity of origami), and the beauty of the quotidian (the complexity of wrinkles in a piece of cloth). At Stanford, Noah will study the geometry and mechanics of soft membranes decorated by seams, a geometric motif that underlies the patterns drafted by a tailor and the microscale mechanisms evolved by single-celled organisms alike.
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