ITP Research Gallery

ITP is an environment for fostering curiosity, for asking the next questions to push beyond what is already known.  Since its founding in 1979, ITP has been about democratizing media and enabling expression with interactive tools. Our community comes from many countries and many kinds of previous training. The open physical environment puts our students and faculty next to each other to see the adjacent possibilities created by this diversity. The research that arises out of curiosity plus diversity is everyday activity at ITP — new avenues of inquiry appear between people with different aptitudes, backgrounds and styles.

Forging new paths between disciplines and approaches requires taking some missteps. Interesting questions and problems do not generally yield answers that are clearly right or wrong.  We work hard to maintain a pluralistic culture where people who come to different conclusions feel comfortable still working together. ITP has a culture of safety and support that gives us the confidence to take risks in challenging ourselves and others, a playful environment where “failure” is just part of the exploration.

Being able to spill across disciplines is the best way to generate new questions. Many of our classes teach the “what” and “why” of the sciences and humanities; our students then apply what they learn by making and doing things, adding “how” of design and engineering to their classroom work. Asking questions is free and answering them with accessible tools make the results more powerfully applicable.  Rather than requiring enormous research grants, our style of research can be carried out by the students themselves or even by the users of the users of their projects.