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This immersive studio course guides students through the process of conceptualizing, developing, and showcasing a cutting-edge biodesign project for submission to the distinguished Biodesign Challenge. The course offers a unique opportunity to explore the dynamic intersection of biology, design, and technology, fostering innovative solutions to real-world challenges.

The Biodesign Challenge is an international education program that explores the intersection of biotechnology, art, and design. In this program, students work in groups to develop projects that examine biotechnology’s relationship with sustainability, fashion, agriculture, architecture, biomaterials, medicine, water, ethics, and more.

Students will:

Explore the Landscape of Biodesign: Engage with foundational concepts in biodesign through readings, discussions, and workshops.

Conduct Research: Collaborate with science mentors to investigate biological systems and emerging technologies.

Develop and Test Hypotheses: Frame research questions and iteratively test ideas to refine their understanding and approach.

Create Prototypes: Design and fabricate tangible or digital prototypes that embody their innovative vision.

Pitch Idea: Hone communication and storytelling skills to deliver a compelling pitch that effectively conveys the impact of their project.

Curate an Exhibition: Craft an engaging gallery exhibition experience to share their work with a broader audience, showcasing its potential for intended impact.

This course emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration, hands-on experimentation, and critical engagement with biodesign. By the end of the semester, students will not only develop a competitive entry for the Biodesign Challenge but also gain invaluable experience in working at the forefront of design and biological innovation. 

Prerequisites: Open to ITP and IMA students. No prior experience in biology required.

Phase 1: Explore topics in biodesign and advancements in scientific research

Phase 2: Conduct Research with the guidance of a scientist mentor

Phase 3: Prototype

Phase 4: Prepare pitch, exhibition design, video and website

Phase 5: Present at the Biodesign Challenge

This studio course introduces students to the culture and practice of open source. Through short exercises and discussions, students will learn about technical development, community, and version control for open source. Students will propose and make a modest contribution to an existing open source project or release an early version of their own tool, library, or other open source project. The ml5.js project will serve as an example and option for participation for those interested in contributing to an active open source community.

Society has always dreamed about humans coexisting with automatons, robots, and talking machines that fit into every facet of daily life. As a consequence of computation and the internet leaving the flat screen, alternative forms of human-machine relationships are increasingly becoming more ubiquitous. Designing for these new machines brings novel challenges and requires a different approach.

From HAL 9000 to early automatons, this class presents an overview of history, methods, technologies, and design challenges involved in building and living with Robots and Social Devices.

Discussions and explorations will emphasize the cultural, political, and technical aspects. Over the course of the semester, students will interrogate and deconstruct examples of Robots (in sci-fi, popular culture, art installations, assistive tech, connected devices), and design their own systems by appropriating existing technologies.

In this 7-week class, students will be introduced to Voice Interface concepts (TTS, STT, ML), as well as the ESP32, Google Teachable Machines, and the AIY kit – VOICE.

Society has always dreamed about humans coexisting with automatons, robots, and talking machines that fit into every facet of daily life. As a consequence of computation and the internet leaving the flat screen, alternative forms of human-machine relationships are increasingly becoming more ubiquitous. Designing for these new machines brings novel challenges and requires a different approach.

From HAL 9000 to early automatons, this class presents an overview of history, methods, technologies, and design challenges involved in building and living with Robots and Social Devices.

Discussions and explorations will emphasize the cultural, political, and technical aspects. Over the course of the semester, students will interrogate and deconstruct examples of Robots (in sci-fi, popular culture, art installations, assistive tech, connected devices), and design their own systems by appropriating existing technologies.

In this 7-week class, students will be introduced to Computer Vision concepts (Image Tracking, Image Recognition, ML), as well as the ESP32, Google Teachable Machines, OpenMV, and the AIY kit – VISION.

We are living during a Cambrian explosion of new tools and techniques for capturing, creating, and experiencing 3D media, driven by recent research in machine learning and generative artificial intelligence. This class will give students an introduction to some of these very recently available tools and techniques in the world of 3D, and a set of practical exercises to explore incorporating them into their own creative processes.

The class will explore 3D reconstruction from 2D photos and videos (e.g. Gaussian Splatting, Neural Radiance Fields), 3D content generation (e.g. texture generation, image-to-mesh and text-to-mesh models) and alternative workflows (e.g. ‘agentic’ workflows with 3D software using the model-context-protocol, interactive world models, 3D-grounded video generation).  Exact course materials will be updated to reflect newly available research.

This course will be collaborative and hands-on with in-class activities and weekly exercises.  No prior experience with 3D software is necessary, and students will work across several tools (some web based, some command line, some desktop software) throughout the 7-weeks.

Have you ever noticed that when we look at our phones—head bent, hands joined—it looks a lot like praying? They say God died in the late 1800s; not long after, computers rushed in. Still, no matter how many times and how fervently humanity turns to ChatGPT for guidance, this cannot yet be called religion—right? This course considers how machines may one day usurp the place of God or religion more overtly.

We’ll begin with a quick survey of how machines have already entered into religious traditions, partnered with a historical and theoretical framework from Wendy Chun and Erik Davis. After that, the majority of the course will be concerned with worlds beyond our own—which we’ll consider only through the funny-mirror reflection of speculative fiction. We’ll imagine tech-mediated religion in new worlds alongside artists, science fiction writers, and Afrofuturists like Nalo Hopkinson, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Reza Negarestani, Ted Chiang, Tabita Rezaire, and Moreshin Allahyari. Throughout the course, students will work on their own speculative worldbuilding project, including a tech-mediated religion. They will then build an artifact of that world in the medium of their choosing.

This studio course introduces students to the culture and practice of so-called “content” creation, questioning what it even means to call everything content. Students bring their own production skills and interests to develop and refine a personal approach to making work for online audiences. Through short exercises and small-group collaborations, students will experiment with formats (a TV recap podcast, a how-to tutorial, a video essay, a “let’s play” live stream, vertical, horizontal, long, short, and more) and consider how different platforms shape creative possibilities and constraints. Guest speakers will share their experiences working in the “creator industry.” For the final project, students will propose and produce an initial installment or pilot of their own ongoing “show” or creative series.

This course, *A History and an Introduction to Generative Art,* explores the deep-rooted history of art created through systems, rules, and algorithms, from early examples like Islamicate tiling patterns, Mozart’s musical game of dice, Dadaist poetry, and Sol LeWitt’s instructions-based art to contemporary generative art practices involving computational machines, networks, and machines with code and, more recently, AI. We’ll examine how artists throughout history have embraced generative processes, asking: How do systems and instructions function as creative tools? What role does randomness or precision play in generative art? How might we consider a critical framework of assessing generative art? Students will engage with both historical and modern examples, gaining an understanding of how generative art has challenged traditional notions of authorship and artistic intent. Throughout the course, students will experiment with various forms of generative art—whether it’s creating visual works, music, or video—using mediums like code, instructions, or AI, and read from theorists like Max Bense, Phillip Galanter, Frieder Nake, and Mary Boden. Projects might range from algorithmic music compositions to rule-based visual designs or hybrid AI-generated videos. The hands-on approach, combined with a rich exploration of historical and cultural precedents, equips students with both the technical and conceptual tools to explore generative art in its many forms and engage critically with the future of the field.

What does it mean to teach machines to listen? And how does our understanding of “listening” inform how we “tune” machine ears to listen to the world around us? In this course, students will learn how to teach machines to listen from the ground up. Through programming exercises and thought-provoking readings, we will see how design decisions in building these systems inform just what machines are able to listen for. Beginning with fundamental audio signal processing techniques, students will learn the building blocks to go from machines that respond to simple tones to ones that recognize speech and understand complex information in our sonic environment. Complementing these technical exercises are readings and case studies that help contextualize this technology within a larger history of teaching machines to understand the world through sound. These examples highlight our own biases and presumptions in building these systems, forcing us to ask: what is the machine listening for, and for whom? This class will primarily be guided through academic readings and in-class/take home programming exercises. Experience with programming is a prerequisite. Not simply a technical programming course, however, this course can also be though of as a History of Technology or Science and Technology Studies course, using machine listening, speech recognition, voice interfaces, environmental sound classification, and audio understanding as topics to explore a techno-history that extends back to pre-electronic practices from the late 19th century to our contemporary moment with Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and state-of-the-art voice models. We will examine this technology alongside papers, articles, and scholarly writings to frame our engagement with this pursuit of teaching machines to listen within a particular history and context, as though we are archeologists examining this technological artifact through the lens of the humanities, social sciences and anthropology. The intention of this course is to become better informed technologists, equipped with technical skill, historical context, and critical design approaches to create listening machines responsibly and ethically, mitigating the risks and harm for those it listens to.

This class explores issues of cultural representation and exploitation through readings and discussions while also providing an introduction to motion capture, rigging and 3D environments. Core elements of the workshop integrate performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question access, control and representation.

This class explores issues of cultural representation and exploitation through readings and discussions while also providing an introduction to motion capture, rigging and 3D environments. Core elements of the workshop integrate performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question access, control and representation.

This class explores issues of cultural representation and exploitation through readings and discussions while also providing an introduction to motion capture, rigging and 3D environments. Core elements of the workshop integrate performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question access, control and representation.