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    Designing for Digital Fabrication

    The ability to digitally fabricate parts and whole pieces directly from our computers or design files used to be an exotic and expensive option not really suitable for student or designer projects, but changes in this field in the past 5 years have brought these capabilities much closer to our means, especially as ITP students. ITP and NYU now offer us access to laser cutting, CNC routing, and 3D stereolithography. In this class, we will learn how to design for and operate these machines. Emphasis will be put on designing functional parts that can fit into a larger project or support other components as well as being successful on a conceptual and aesthetic level. In this class, we will discover methods to design projects on CAD applications for total control of the result, and we will develop algorithmic ways to create designs from software (Processing) to take advantage of the ability to make parts and projects that are unique, customizable, dependent on external data or random. The class will include 3 assignments to create projects using the three machines (laser, router, 3D) and the opportunity to work on a final project.


    Game Design and the Psychology of Choice

    As game and interaction designers we create systems and choices that can either prey upon our psychological foibles or help us avoid decision pitfalls. It is our responsibility to understand how we decide, to consider the ethics of the systems we create and to practice designing systems in a purposeful manner.

    Game Design & The Psychology of Choice will provide interaction and game designers with an understanding of the factors that influence behavior and decision-making by looking at the intertwining of cognitive psychology and economics through the development of behavioral economics. These disciplines study behavior on the individual and group level, often revealing some of the why behind the rules of thumb and folk wisdom that game designers come to intuitively. But understanding the why—why we fall into decision traps; why certain tradeoffs tax our brain more than others; why we are overconfident about our abilities; why certain decisions make us uncomfortable—allows us to more purposefully apply our design craft, both in and out of games. Finally, as a class, we will take what we learn about how we think and create series of game experiences based around key cognitive science concepts.

    Assignments may include:
    •Mod a cognitive science experiment into a game or experience
    •Analyze and present a game through the lens of cognitive science and behavioral economics
    •Create game or experience based around a particular insight from cognitive science or behavioral economics


    The Medium of Memory

    What is the medium of memory? In this 14-week studio class, we will dig into this question through creative storytelling. Starting from a lens-based practice, this class will introduce traditional and bleeding-edge documentary methods to inform our own varied approaches to activating archival material. Through weekly “readings” (articles, podcasts, films), written reflections, and creative assignments, we’ll explore:

    • how technology has impacted our relationship to memory;
    • how visual interventions can can surface alternative narratives;
    • how to make under- and unrecorded histories visible, and call into question the power dynamics embedded in “official” records; and
    • how we might recast objects and sites of memory-keeping, like heirlooms, journals, and memorials, as a mode of engaged preservation.

    Mid-way through the course, students will identify either personal or collective histories to open up to their own individual creative reexamination, memorialization, or transformation––each producing a final project with the technology and approaches of their choosing that serves to answer the question we started with––what is the medium of memory?


    Understanding Networks

    Interactive technologies seldom stand alone. They exist in networks, and they facilitate networked connections between people. Designing technologies for communications requires an understanding of networks. This course is a foundation in how networks work. Through weekly readings and class discussions and a series of short hands-on projects, students gain an understanding of network topologies, how the elements of a network are connected and addressed, what protocols hold them together, and what dynamics arise in networked environments. This class is intended to supplement the many network-centric classes at ITP. It is broad survey, both of contemporary thinking about networks, and of current technologies and methods used in creating them.

    Prerequisites: Students should have an understanding of basic programming. This class can be taken at the same time as, or after, Intro to Computational Media or an equivalent intro to programming. Some, though not all, production work in the class requires basic programming. There is a significant reading component to this class as well.

    Learning Objectives

    In this class, you will learn about how communications networks are structured, and you will learn how to examine those structures using software tools. By the end of this class, you should have a working knowledge of the following concepts:

    * The basics of network theory, some history of the internet and the organizations and stakeholders involved in its creation and maintenance
    * The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model and standard internet protocols such as Internet Protocol (IP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) , Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). 
    * Network addressing, private and public IP addresses
    * What hosts, servers, and clients are and a few ways in which they communicate
    * What a command line interface  (CLI) is and how to use the tools available in one
    * The basics of internet security
    * How telecommunications networks are similar to other infrastructural networks, like power and transportation, and how they are different.


    Programming from A to Z

    This course is a survey of programming strategies and techniques for the procedural analysis and generation of text-based data. Topics include analyzing text based on its statistical properties, automated text production using probabilistic methods, and text visualization. Students will learn server-side and client-side JavaScript programming and build single-page web applications as well as bots for social media networks. Additionally, this course will also include examples on how to interface with the latest open-source and commercial machine learning models for text and image generation. The writing of this course description may or may not have been assisted by one of these so-called “AI” models The course will include weekly homework coding exercises and an open-ended final project.


    Shared Minds

    This class asks students to think about thinking. Based on first person introspection, meditation and readings in psychology, students will examine the experience of their minds. Then we look at how computation works as a medium to capture and share that experience. Class time is evenly divided between conceptual discussions around psychology of media, looking at student work and learning coding skills for the following week.

    On the technical side, the class gently picks up from ICM moving away from P5 to create 2D interfaces with vanilla javascript in an environment of Visual Studio Code, Github and Copilot. It moves to 3D using the three.js library, and to 4D by adding persistence (and sharing) using Firebase databases. With machine learning APIs and optionally Python Colab Notebooks the class then moves into hyperdimensional space using embeddings to navigate and compare within it. Finally the class returns to 2D or 3D to reach your body using UMAP dimensions reduction and embodied interfaces like VR, ML5 or P5LiveMedia. These are all web technologies (game engines will not work for this class). Each week students are expected to produce a quick sketch playing with the tech and imagine its application as a tool of improved communication.

    In tandem with this technical journey each week there are conceptual readings and prompts asking students about how the technology aligns with the way they think. In a short blog post students are asked to take a critical look for the shortcomings of existing computational media and for ways we can make better media for connecting people with a better understanding of the mind. At the end of the semester students work on a final project using some or all of the concepts and technologies from the class.

    Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048)