Evening

Innovation at Speed (Topics in ITP) +

Melissa Parsey | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 411 Meetings:7-Second Half
2 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Monday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

How do you get more teens to participate in sport? Ensure that generative AI tools don’t perpetuate bias? Or make the process of renting a car suck less? These are some the big, broad questions you’ll tackle as part of this course.

The format: Each week you’ll be tasked with a new, real-world challenge to address as part of a team. To help you, subject-matter experts in research, strategy and design will share valuable, relevant knowledge and frameworks for you to pressure-test. Your team will be expected to use these frameworks to break-down the problem, ideate quickly and present-back solutions. The form and shape of these solutions is for you to define. The only limitation is time.

The goal is to help you hone your skills through rapid, practical application, while also exposing you to new methodologies and expertise that can elevate your craft. Innovation is a practice, not just a process, and at the end of 7 weeks we hope you’ll be more confident approaching ambiguous questions and working with others to shape new, unexpected solutions.

We can’t predict the future, but we know the questions we’ll need to collectively solve will only become bigger, and more urgent. This is a bootcamp for everyone and anyone who’s up for taking them on.

Outside The Box: Site-Specific + Immersive Explorations (Topics in ITP) +

Mia Rovegno | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:7-First Half
2 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Monday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This course introduces students to modalities for creating site-specific and immersive art and performance. Assignments will examine the work of artists who challenge the limitations of the physical, psychological and transactional spaces that have come to define conventional production models. Students will regularly receive prompts from which collaborative work will be workshopped, generated and presented. The sites and practices explored will de-center script/text as spine, institutional space as gathering place, linear storytelling as narrative, and separation between audience and artist as social contract. Through group performance projects and presentations, students will investigate how Site evokes Narrative and Event differently in brick & mortar, virtual, historic, liminal, dead, found, contested, democratized and community spaces. Our work will unpack the challenges and opportunities presented when we relinquish creative control of such unfixed elements as serendipity, impermanence, improvisation, audience agency, public space, weather, and pandemic.

Developing Assistive Technology +

Anita Perr | Amy Hurst | ITPG-GT.2446 | Tues 5:00pm to 7:50pm in 370 Jay Street, Room 316C Meetings:14
All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, No Tags, Tuesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This multidisciplinary course allows students from a variety of backgrounds to work together to learn about and develop assistive technology. Partnering with outside organizations, students will work in teams to identify a clinical need relevant to a certain clinical site or client population, and learn the process of developing an idea and following that through to the development of a prototype product.
This course provides an overview of some of the assistive technologies currently used by people with disabilities to participate in life’s activities, including those used for computer access, mobility, and activities of daily living (ADLs). Working in small groups, you will work with a mentor with a disability to solve a problem by creating a tech solution making the problem easier to deal with. We have a number of ongoing projects such as developing interactive activities to improve balance of preschoolers with hearing impairments and cochlear implants, or working with a deaf woman in Argentina to develop a tool that can allow her to participate in group discussions. Other projects may include working with people with physical and sensory disabilities. This course provides you your own evidence of the benefit of using client centered design with input from multiple professionals.

Canvas for Coders +

Joohyun Park | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3016 | Thur 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:7-Second Half
2 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Thursday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Your web browser is a digital canvas for 21st-century artists. While being one of the most common mediums today, web space has infinite possibilities for new aesthetics. This course covers Three.js fundamentals, providing students with the skills and insights to create arts in web 3D.

This course requires ICM or equivalent coding experience.

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

MoCap for the Archive +

Ami Mehta | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3021 | Wed 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 411 Meetings:7-First Half
2 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Wednesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

How can motion capture (MoCap) be used to archive, preserve, and share intangible heritage forms, such as performing arts, rituals, and other social practices and traditions? This course approaches motion capture through the lens of ethnography — drawing on techniques of observation, participation, and qualitative design research. This class will offer an overview of different motion capture technologies, such as 2D-3D pose estimation and depth mapping, with a practical focus on learning the OptiTrack system at ITP. We will start by covering the basics of OptiTrack and build up to other workflows and techniques used across animation, game design, and virtual production (e.g. OptiTrack to Unreal Engine or Unity).

Prerequisite: CL: Hypercinema (ITPG-GT 2004)

Multisensory Design +

Lauren Race | ITPG-GT.2375 | Thur 6:00pm to 8:30pm in No Room Required (Brooklyn) Meetings:7-First Half
2 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Thursday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Our users have senses that they use to perceive information in different ways. Some perceive best through sight, some through hearing, others through touch. Designers often prioritize visual information, excluding those who benefit from other sensory modalities. In this class, we’ll take a multisensory approach to design that makes interfaces more accessible to disabled and nondisabled users. Students will learn how to design for the senses (think tactile controls combined with atmospheric sounds and olfactory or taste experiences), while gaining an understanding of the assumptions we make about our users’ sensory preferences. Students should come with prior experience with physical computing and fabrication techniques and can expect to learn technical processes for the user research, usability testing, and iterative design of multisensory interfaces. Over the course of 14 weeks, students will design an interface for the 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), culminating in one final project that includes at least 3 sensory modalities.

Game Design and the Psychology of Choice +

Melissa Parker | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3028 | Wed 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:14
4 Point, All, Elective, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, Wednesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

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

Socially Engaged Art and Digital Practice +

Clarinda Mac Low | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2156 | Wed 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
4 Point, All, analysis, art, capitalism, community, computers, critical, criticalthinking, dialogue, digital, digitalart, digitalpractice, discussions, Elective, engaged, Evening, Fall 2025, Graduate, interestingreadings, internet, itp, life, materials, network, networks, online, participatory, performance, practice, presentations, projects, reading, readings, research, social, socialjustice, sociallyengaged, sociallyengagedart, socialpractice, technology, Wednesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Artificial intelligence, basic communication, data processing, image manipulation, and even financial systems have transformed our social and political worlds and our artistic practice. This course will examine the material, ethical, and esthetic implications of a digital and networked world through the lens of socially engaged art, where art and creative work intersect directly with people and civic life. This includes discussion of how digital and networked tools both increase and complicate physical, economic, and cultural accessibility, and the ethical and social implications of the newest technologies. We will focus especially on the impact that new technologies have on the environment.

We will concentrate on creating projects that examine and critique the inner workings of digital practice through socially engaged work. Students will be asked to propose several projects as thought experiments, and fully realize one online/digital socially engaged project. We will review and discuss the different definitions of “socially engaged art” and address the ethics of developing new technologies, including discussions about “best practices,” and investigate how we approach the physical and digital social spaces around us.

We will look at artists like Stephanie Dinkins, Kyle McDonald, Ari Melenciano, and the group Forensic Architecture. We will have some meetings and activities in public spaces, field trips to organizations such as Eyebeam and Genspace, and guest lecturers.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have questions about taking the course, or the course content.