ITP Winter Show 2011

Design for Unicef

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Design for Unicef is a class that takes real world problems and ask its students to come up with design solutions that improve the lives of others. The class projects range from bikes that are transformed into ambulances for pregnant women, re-purposing/transforming plastic bags into a building/textile material, moveable media that educates, and games that empower and teach the future of tomorrow.

Sound Affects

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The affective states of the user is extracted, analyzed, amplified, and sonified. Emotional expression becomes a soundscape. Sound Affect was originally developed as a performance piece for New Interfaces for Musical Expression

monkey talk

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A stuffed animal vibrates whenever a patient's mother sends her a text. With every vibration, the patient is constantly reminded that her mother is thinking about her. By pressing the monkey's hand, she can send her mother a text, too.

ITP Student Photo Installation

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Play with people\’s pictures.

Machine Mind

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

No matter how objective and logical our machines are, they always have their own personalities. Each machine has different \”needs\” to make it work properly or odd moments when they crash that are unique to that particular machine. What if we could magnify and see the anthropomorphized personality of our machine and interact with it like a creature?
Machine Mind is a machine with a mind of its own. Touch it and it reacts to you with its own restless facial expressions. If it likes you, it will sing.

The Mindful Shave

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This semester in \”Product Poetry: Designing Inter-experience\” with Gary Natsume and Peng Zhao we examined the meaning and values associated with particular consumer products and the ways users perceive, interact with, and assimilate them into their daily lives.

At the beginning of the semester, each student or group chose a particular object with which we each have a strong emotional bond. Throughout the course each team architected a framework of direct and indirect communication to implement between the object and its users, in an effort to create meaning and value.

I chose my shaving kit, including my safety razor, badger brush, and shaving cream: a set of physical products with which I have a very intimate relationship.

The goal of my project is to facilitate and catalyze the development of meditative experience and habit through physical and digital augmentation of the shaving process.

I attempt this in a few ways:

Firstly, I provide the user both visual and sonic feedback while shaving, in an effort to keep them “present” and deepen their awareness of their physical context.

Secondly, I present a system of “shaving artifacts” in an effort to facilitate a traditional western shaving environment.

My project is an installation piece: a small antique dresser, a vertical monitor with custom frame to serve as the “mirror,” and an iMac.

I run a processing sketch on the “mirror” which creates simple motion trails based on movement. My idea here was to extend the “half-life” of each physical shaving stroke in order to offer the opportunity for users to appreciate the dexterity and physicality of their movements.

When a user approaches the piece there is no sonic feedback but as soon as they sit and orient themselves to the “mirror,” the gentles tones become audible. Throughout their shaving experience, the music shifts and modulates in harmony and discord with their physical movements.

The sonic feedback his handled with FaceOSC, a tool for prototyping face-based interaction which is connected via a tool called Osculator to the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Ableton Live.

360.660.577

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

360 cubes are made with receipts that I have collected from August 13th 2010 to July 31st 2011. Receipts are medium of my trace for what I did, where I was, and when I was. Each cube represents one day, and cubes are arranged in chronological order. Viewers can interactively light it up for the details of my expenditures.

Useless Targets

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Center for Constitutional Rights has been awarded a database of NYPD stop and frisk data through an ongoing lawsuit over the constitutionality of the policy in action. The Village Voice has tape recordings of police meetings where line officers are asked to raise their activity to fulfill illegal quotas. All of this information is used in a sound installation to experience the magnitude of the issue and highlight the systemic obstacles we face regarding our law enforcement system.

Audio attributes of the tapes are mapped to aggregate numbers. With the flood of data around this issue in the news, it is important to represent the information in an accessible way for people who are not exposed to the stops-and-frisks on a daily basis. Moreover, it's no secret that our criminal justice system is rife with biases. While 90% of all stops are of Black and Latino people, arrest rates for firearm and contraband possession from stops are the same across race. This project attempts to tackle a chunk of the larger issues.

Finally, this is an exploration of our relationship to data. We use it to measure success, but our reliance on numbers may corrode trust in our ability to make good judgements. Also, we're flooded with data these days, and while the 600,601 number is striking, it's still difficult to feel that number represents people and lives. A sonic display may help us better connect.

Sea of Light

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project visualizes the dynamic movement of water through a grid of LEDs and translates sound energy into simulated wind energy.

It's comprised of a small fiberglass vessel in the shape of a row-boat. The thin walls are lined with an LED matrix shinning outward. An accelerometer is connected to detect the pitch and row of the boat and effects the lighting of the LEDs. This effect will simulate the boat floating in water.

A secondary rocking base will allow the boat to rock. To control the rocking a mic sensor detects sound from the viewer and magnetically 'rocks' the boat by pulling on the sides of the base.

Altar

Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music is a very powerful medium that many people use as a spiritual beacon that helps to guide, motivate, relax, and feel something greater than oneself. For such a powerful form of media we often see very bland modes to control it (mp3 players, home stereo systems, etc.), but why not give this medium the altar it deserves? In response to this question, Robbie Tilton, Christie Leece and Katie Tibbetts created a physical computing piece called The Altar. The Altar uses candle light to play and adjust an audio composition that is meant to embrace the power of music. The piece was made with 17 photo cells, 1 Arduino Mega, and a whole lot of love. The tops of each tier is laser cut (totaling 6 hours to engrave the entire piece). As we continue to improve the piece, we hope to place this in a public space (such as a church), to allow more guests outside the NYU ITP community to enjoy it.