1 Point

Immersive Music & Haptics: Creating Music for the Skin (Topics in ITP) +

Daniel Belquer | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2380 | Sat 12:10pm to 6:25pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450> Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Midday, New, No Tags, Saturday, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This is a demo single day workshop to introduce you to a part of the future of music: how to create an immersive, emotional and engaging experience using the multi-awarded Music:Not Impossible haptic devices. MUSIC:NOT IMPOSSIBLE (M:NI) Music:Not Impossible started 10 years ago to create a better live music experience for the deaf and hard of hearing. We passed this threshold a while ago and we are now creating experiences worldwide for all to experience music regardless of hearing level. We have won Time’s Magazine Best Inventions of 2023, the Edison Awards two times and many other important awards and acknowledgements. We also have been praised by the likes of Pharrell Williams, Lady Gaga and Jon Batiste. THE INSTRUCTOR Daniel Belquer is a composer, inventor and intermedia artist that has been teaching and creating artworks blending music, theater and interactive technology for decades. He is one of the co-founders of Music:Not Impossible, and has been developing the project since its inception.

The Body Everywhere and Here (Topics in ITP) +

Lisa M Jamhoury | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2380 | Sat 11:40am to 6:10pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:10pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Morning, New, No Tags, Saturday, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

For an estimated 300,000 years, human experience has been rooted in the physical body. In the past two decades, we’ve evolved to engage through digital mediations—video calls, text messages, social profiles—where presence is fragmented, and embodiment is abstracted. How do we design digital experiences that acknowledge and activate the body rather than ignore it?

This weekend course explores embodied interaction in digital spaces through both theory and practice. We will examine the history and politics of motion capture, the role of presence in mediated environments, and the ways computers perceive and package the body. The course will include group discussions of influential works in the development of real-time embodied interaction, including those by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Susan Kozel, Myron Krueger, and Laurie Anderson. Students will work in groups with computer vision and real-time motion data to build interactive experiences that explore digital forms and their spatial impacts.

Emphasizing accessibility and experimentation, this course will focus on using low-fidelity and inexpensive tools that are easy to get up and running with, making them ideal for rapid prototyping and creative exploration. ICM-level programming experience is required.

Textile Interfaces +

Kate Hartman | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2030 | Sat 11:00am to 5:15pm in > Sun 11:00am to 5:15pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Morning, Saturday, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Want to make an interface that can be squished, stretched, stroked, or smooshed? This course will introduce the use of electronic textiles as sensors. Focus will be placed on physical interaction design – working with the affordances of these materials to create interfaces designed to invite or demand diverse types of physical interaction. This course does not require knowledge or love of sewing – a variety of construction methods will be introduced. It will rely on a physical computing approach, with Arduino being used to read sensor values. Working with a breadth of conductive and resistive materials, students will learn to design and create bespoke alternative interfaces that can live in our clothing, furniture, and built environments.

Prerequisite: Intro to Phys. Comp. (ITPG-GT 2301)

Writing Good Code +

Daniel Tsadok | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3014 | Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Graduate, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

As software projects become more complex, it becomes increasingly important to keep the code organized and manageable; otherwise, it becomes extremely difficult to implement new ideas, and the project is much more likely to be prone to mysterious and frustrating bugs. This course will demonstrate several approaches to organizing code for larger-scale projects, including how to write and name functions and classes, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), pure functions, unit testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD), and why to avoid “magic numbers” and global variables. The focus of the course will be on JavaScript, using P5.js, but the principles will apply to most languages. We will be doing an ongoing, step-by-step, in-class refactor* of a complex sketch. We will also be using version control to track our changes every class. Students will be expected to complete weekly readings and assignments, and to refactor one of their previous projects, using the principles learned in this course.

* Refactoring means rewriting the code, without any changes to how the program behaves. Students should have some programming experience prior to taking this course, and would ideally have an existing software project they would like to develop.

Haptics +

Kate Hartman | ITPG-GT.2457 | Sat 10:30am to 5:00pm in > Sun 10:30am to 4:30pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Graduate, haptics, hardware, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

From the crass rattle of early pager motors to the sophisticated clicks and purrs of the iPhone Taptic engine, the ability to buzz has increasingly worked its way into our devices. This course focuses on physical prototyping and interaction design for non-visual feedback. Specifically, it will explore how haptic feedback can be utilized and integrated into handhelds, wearables, objects, and environments – anything that we touch or that touches us. Traditional tools such as eccentric rotating mass (ERM) motors, linear resonance actuators (LRAs), and haptic motor drivers will be introduced as well as less conventional methods such as gentle poking, prodding, warming, cooling, squeezing, and tickling. Through hands-on experimentation and a review of research to date, students will emerge from this course well-positioned to incorporate haptic feedback into their future projects. Note: This course is designed for students who have previous experience with physical computing and Arduino.

Next-Gen Design: Crafting AI-Driven Products +

Helene Alonso | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2380 | Sat 09:30am to 3:45pm in > Sun 09:30am to 3:45pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Graduate, New, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

Designing AI products is not the same as traditional UX design + AI, you need to have a completely different approach where the capacities of the technology and the modalities of interaction are embedded in the design process from the start. By the end of this hands on class, you’ll be empowered to create innovative, intelligent products that resonate with and delight users.

Intro to Curating New Media Art +

Julia Kaganskiy | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3036 | Sat 12:10pm to 6:25pm in > Sun 3:20pm to 9:35pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, curation, Elective, Graduate, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

In this course students will be introduced to the role of the curator with a very brief history of curation, followed by a focus on the particular challenges and approaches to curating new media art. The class will give an overview of practical approaches to exhibition-making both online and offline, looking at artist-led approaches to curation in particular. The class will include a hands-on practicum in which students will work towards creating a mock exhibition plan.

Motion Design for User Feedback +

Alon Chitayat | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2059 | Sat 12:10pm to 6:25pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Graduate, New, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

Microinteractions are everywhere, you interact with them on a regular basis.
We communicate emotions through animated emojis, we burst heart buttons with love
whenever we like a post or password fields that shake when you type in the wrong password

These small but significant animations offer users delightful moments and valuable feedback. They serve to intuitively guide your users without the need for explicit instructions, and lend your interface a distinct personality and essence. As designers, you have the power to infuse soul and character into every interaction with the secret power of motion, creating memorable experiences that resonate with your audience.

What is a Lottie animation?
Lottie is a JSON-based animation format that has garnered significant attention from designers and developers alike, due to its lightweight and cross-platform capabilities. With Lottie, animations can be seamlessly integrated into websites and apps, and play effortlessly on any device or browser.

What will we learn?
Using LottieLab, a free online Lottie animation editor, we’ll learn how to design, animate and
export playful Lottie animations as interactive UI components (such as loaders, animated
buttons or icons)as whimsical moments of user delight.
We’ll learn how to integrate & trigger them in prototypes and web interfaces.
We’ll examine the basic principles of designing motion for user experience, we’ll learn how to translate human body language into micro animations.

We’ll cover how to create interactive animated states with fluid transitions between them.

Masquerade +

Ziv Schneider | ITPG-GT.2044 | Sat 12:10pm to 6:25pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Graduate, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Masks have been used around the world since antiquity for ceremonial and practical purposes, as devices for protection, disguise, entertainment and bodily transformation, made to be worn or displayed. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the everyday life as a masked theatrical performance. The performative aspect of our lives today is ever so present in our use of social media, where we present a curated version ourselves for the immediate visual consumption of others. In our `Selfies`, we can assume a multitude of identities and characters. Recent tools and platforms have evolved social media portraiture to an art form and have created new opportunities for artists to create and distribute interactive augmentations, forming new relationships between artists and viewers. This class explores the developing language of social media portraiture enhanced by Augmented Reality. Students will: – review masks in art history, leading up to today – ideate, design and develop an interactive mask (AKA effects/lenses/filters) – learn to use the Meta Spark software to create AR effects.

This course requires CL: Hypercinema or equivalent experience.

Experiments on the Embodied Web +

Lisa M Jamhoury | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3013 | Sat 11:40am to 6:10pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:10pm in Meetings:S-Special
1 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Graduate, In-Person, Spring 2025, Sunday, Yes
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Today’s internet, made up of mostly text documents and two-dimensional images and videos, is the result of historical limitations in bandwidth, graphics processing and input devices. These limitations have made the internet a place where the mind goes, but the body cannot follow. Recent advances in motion capture devices, graphics processing, machine learning, bandwidth and browsers, however, are paving the way for the body to find its place online. Experiments on the Embodied Web will explore the new realm of embodied interactions in the browser across networks. The course will include discussion of influential works in the development of online embodied interaction, including the works of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Susan Kozel, and Laurie Anderson. Together we’ll explore pose detection across webRTC peer connections in p5.js and Three.js. Experience with Node, HTML and JavaScript is helpful but not required. ICM level programming experience is required.

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