User Experience Design +

Peiqi SU | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3017 | Fri 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 411 Meetings:7-First Half
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This 2-pt course aims to provide students with the critical thinking and practical skills for creating effective and compelling interfaces. We will dissect what a compelling user experience is, apply proven research techniques for approaching and defining UX problems and apply design frameworks including mapping and testing techniques. The class format will include lectures, discussion, in-class design exercises and a final project. 

Week 1: what is UX

Week 2: inclusive research methods

Week 3: frameworks for defining a problem

Week 4: understanding behavior and motivation

Week 5: mapping flow and visual strategies, final project intro 

Week 6: testing methods and future UX

Week 7: final projects

Alter Egos: Assuming New Identities Through Costume and Performance +

Ali Santana | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3024 | Mon 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Throughout history, musicians have channeled their creativity into outrageous fashion statements and invented personas: think MF DOOM, Sun Ra, Ghostface Killah, Daft Punk, Leikeli47 and Rammellzee. By embracing their alter egos in extreme and outlandish ways, artists have found their authentic creative voices. This course will introduce participants to the art of masquerade using their resourcefulness to create costumes from found materials, and performance as an exploration in creative expression using new media and technology. Students will be introduced to ideas surrounding abstract storytelling, experimental audio + video production, and A/V performance using a combination of technical and hands-on approaches.

This course requires CL: Hypercinema or equivalent experience.

Prerequisite: CL: Hypercinema (ITPG-GT 2004)

Designing for Well-Being +

Steve Downs | ITPG-GT.3000 | Fri 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410 Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This course would focus on the questions of 1) what makes people healthy? and 2) how can we design tools and environments that support healthy lifestyles? Key topics to be covered include public health concepts like the multiple determinants of health and the social-ecological framework, plus a little evolutionary biology; the role of behavior in health, key tenets of behavioral economics and behavior change strategies; and systems thinking concepts from Donella Meadows and others. Students will come away with a much more sophisticated understanding of the complex system of factors and forces that affect people’s health; understanding of key systems concepts and some techniques for understanding systems; and experience designing for behavior at scale. A potential final project could be to reimagine/redesign a popular commercial service so that it would have a more health-producing impact — or, alternatively, to focus on designing changes to the ITP environment that would promote better health for students, faculty and staff.

About Steve Downs: www.stevedowns.net

Experiential Comics: Interactive Comic Books for the Fourth Industrial Revolution +

Tony Patrick | ITPG-GT.2072 | Thur 12:20pm to 2:50pm in Online Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Juxtaposed to traditional comics, Experiential Comics combines emergent tech, unconventional comic book art/structure, and game engines to offer users a more immersive, continuous storyworld experience. Challenging the status quo of classic and contemporary digital comics, students will explore new technologies/world-building techniques better suited to craft innovative comic book narratives and formats –worthy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Students will ingest a brief history of classic and digital comics formats, collaborate with comic book artists to design engrossing characters, engage in world-building sessions, play with Unity/Unreal engines to generate avatars/ virtual environments, work with actors in motion capture/volumetric capture studios, learn the latest iteration of the Experiential Comics format, and share their unique expressions of Experiential Comics in a final presentation.

Throughout a 7-week period, the course will be divided into 7 themes 1) The Disconnection of Digital Comics 2) Classic and Unconventional Comics Continuity 3) Marvel vs DC vs Insert Your Universe Here 4) Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies 5) Capture & Creation 6) Infinite Engagement and Unlocking Immersive Format 7) Experiential Comics Presentations. Each weekly class will be divided into two halves 1) Exploration of Theme/Discussion 2) Process, Practices, & Play.

This course requires CL: Hypercinema or equivalent experience.

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
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.

Bioprinters & Biofabrication for Artists (Topics in ITP) +

Matt Griffin | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Fri 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 411 Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Biofabrication has existed as a concept for many decades to refer to technologies for fabricating living tissue constructs in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The collective ambition across thousands of scientists, hospitals, and labs remains the creation of entire solid human organs to address the urgent demand for transplantable living organs that the donor system is unable to meet. Within this research are also approaches to organ-on-a-chip/microphysiological systems that are already transforming the trajectory of how we develop medicines, evaluate cosmetics and materials without animal testing, and finally gain more systemic understanding of pivotal under-researched areas such as human reproductive health and the behavior of nimble systemic cancers.

But this phrase has now also been co-opted by industrial design and product development as the label for the customer and designer driven movement to get beyond traditional manufacturing methods towards sustainable and nature-inspired approaches that lean on living organisms and biological materials as the means to create new materials and products. Everything from fibers and textiles, “vegan leather,” and carbon-capturing construction materials, to fully compostable packing peanuts and highly optimized hypoallergenic skin contact materials that outperform conventional animal-grown hairs and synthetic fibers.

This course gleefully embraces both of these definitions at the same time!

This Topics in ITP 2-credit course starts with the students modifying off-the-shelf low-costs 3D printers into a syringe-extruder bioprinting platform suited to FRESH bioprinting, a unique form of embedded fabrication that is well suited to a range of compelling biomaterials and biofabrication targets within the scope of what materials are safe for students to handle and process in the ITP Materials Kitchen. By building these extruders, modifying these printers, and learning to process a wide range of unique biomaterials, students will have mastered the skills needed to build, tune, and operate this equipment in future collaborations with local area science labs and startups. As a bonus, this course works directly with the inventors of the open source FRESH bioprinting process to evaluate and test unreleased new innovations in bioprinter extruder designs, and the students will join the instructor to participate as affiliates in the collaborative FRESH scientific community, including sharing back improvements in machine modification, slicing, and machine operation with other scientists and physicians working with FRESH.

On the biofabrication side, the “analog materials” that we use with the FRESH bioprinters that mimic the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) of biological systems are not only a means of testing and exploring the type of embedded fabrication used in “direct writing” delivery of living cells, these materials are also the key materials used in the industrial design research into sustainable design via biofabrication: collagen, gelatin, alginate, hyaluronic acid, fibrin, chitosan, PEG, and several others. Drawing on a wide range of safe biomaterial exploration introduced by molecular gastronomy and sustainable materials research, students will learn protocols and modifications of materials that may prove useful to them elsewhere in their art and design practices.

It might be something of a lucky coincidence that both the biological research and new materials research overlap with so many of their materials exploration, but this course will make a claim that these parallel efforts share commonalities. This course aims to introduce students to this pioneering technology with attention to how creative technologists might also repurpose these approaches for working with their own target materials and objectives, intervening with these technologies. The creative problem solving that scientists, engineers, clinicians, and biomaterials experts go through to find their route to sustaining living cells and tissues parallels how artists, designers, engineers, and architects look to harvest new properties and capabilities out of their materials. Just as the bioprinting platforms we construct in this course are flexible to multiple goals and materials processes, we will encourage our thinking to also look to learn unexpected properties and potentials from the materials and protocols we encounter.

Disrupting (with) Technology: Computational Political Action (Topics in ITP) +

Theo Ellin Ballew | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Fri 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410 Meetings:7-First Half
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This course explores “disruptive” political action that employs new technology. We look at initiatives with various ends and means—some noble, some explosively controversial, and others patently abhorrent. The level of “disruption” also varies extremely—from bureaucratic inconvenience to civilian casualties. However, all the actions express ideological or political protest, either by disrupting technology-driven systems themselves, or by appropriating technology to disrupt non-technical systems of power. Organized via mode of disruption, the class will focus less on the political ends of each action, and more on the modes of achieving those ends. We will also read theorists like Audre Lorde, Laboria Cuboniks, Tung Hui-Hu, Mark Fisher, Hito Steyerl and McKenzie Wark, to help us think about how/when/if recent technology may disrupt, rather than preserve, the status quo. In a world where our technology seems ever more aligned with hegemonic power structures, we must look at the moments where it is used, instead, to veer from them—if we are to see that technology clearly at all. Students will leave the class with a solid grasp of what it means for technology to be complicit in political disruption. Throughout, students will keep an ideation journal in the medium of their choosing, in which they plan their own disruptions and document one guided mini-disruption.

Computational Text 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 critically investigate and explore open-source and commercial machine learning models for text and image generation. The course includes weekly homework coding exercises and an open-ended final project.

Shared Minds +

Dan O'Sullivan | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3033 | Wed 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
Last updated: March 24, 2025

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 the psychology of media, looking at student work, and learning coding skills for the following week. The goal is for students to improve web based social media.

On the technical side, the class gently picks up from any introductory javascript coding class moving away from the P5 to create 2D interfaces with vanilla javascript in an environment of Visual Studio Code, Github and Copilot. Using APIs, we explore the hyper dimensional space of popular machine learning models. Using Firebase databases we then introduce the ability to make media social by sharing our creations across time and with other people. We then pop the hood a bit using google colab notebooks to go beyond the functionality of the ML API’s. Finally the class looks to expose the vast connections from these hyperdimensional models back into 2D or 3D (three.js library) interfaces to reach your body using UMAP dimensions reduction and embodied interfaces like VR, ML5 or P5LiveMedia. The class uses web technologies in the hope of improving the web media ecosystem and so 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.

Designing for Digital Fabrication +

Daniel Rozin | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2890 | Wed 12:10pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:14
Last updated: March 24, 2025

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.

Future of Media and Technology +

Art Kleiner | Juliette Powell | ITPG-GT.2297 | Mon 12:20pm to 2:50pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:14
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This course covers the next several years of evolution in technology, culture, and other trends. It uses scenario planning, a technique for considering complex interrelationships that can’t be predicted, distinguishing predetermined elements from critical uncertainties, and exploring the underlying patterns that influence events. Students will conduct original research on significant trends, use those trends to develop compelling, sophisticated, plausible stories about possible futures, and present the futures – and the strategies they suggest – to a public audience. The course will take place at a pivotal moment of historical uncertainty: recovering from a global pandemic, with AI and other digital technologies crossing a threshold, and dramatic political and economic tensions. All of these, and more, affect media development – and are deeply affected by them. The goal of the course is to enable you to make more robust decisions now in the face of uncertainty — applicable to planning for technological change, starting a business, plotting a career or making major life decisions. This class has developed a longstanding following at ITP because it helps us make sense of complex issues without oversimplifying them. In a climate of candid, respectful discussion and debate, the class explores theories about system dynamics, long-wave organizational and societal change, and economic and technological development.

Addendum from former student:

As I wake up to the serious news of Ukraine, I am reminded of the prediction that I and my classmates Jerllin Cheng and Susanne Forchheimer made while taking a class at NYU-ITP called “Future of New Media,” taught by the great Art Kleiner , which is easily one of the most important classes I’ve ever taken in my life. In this class, Art taught us the craft of prediction in order to make tech art/products that speak to the near future.
It was 2014, and using his strategic workflow, he asked our class to predict what would 2020 be like. Although no one predicted a pandemic, some did predict things likes smart homes etc. But our group was bold enough to predict a “Cyber Cold War,” given Russia’s annexation of Crimea and other developments in China going on during the time of the class. Our presentation went into interesting detail that speculated the end of an open internet, and a further lockdown of borders and increase in video chats for that reason (which did happen in 2020 but for the pandemic), but let’s hope that is not the case now!
Certainly no fear-mongering happening here- just wanted to share that we made a pretty good prediction and that Art Kleiner’s method is incredible (buy his books). Our hearts are with Ukraine and the world.

The Code of Music +

This course explores music through the lenses of computation and interactivity.

The first part of the semester consists of a structured exploration of rhythm, melody, timbre, and harmony, from the perspectives of code, design, and music theory. For each musical element, we will hold listening sessions, represent and manipulate the element in code, and create an interactive study around it.

During the second half of the semester we will cover algorithmic composition techniques such as Markov Chains, Neural Networks and L-systems. As students work toward their final projects, assignments will take a more self-directed approach. Professional practitioners will come in to share their work in the field and give students feedback on their projects.

In-class coding and assignments will be done in P5.js + Tone.js, but students will be free to use other languages and frameworks for their final projects. ICM or equivalent programming experience is required.

This class is a good fit for students who are interested in:

– Creating interactive music pieces and digital instruments
– Deepening their understanding of how music works
– Continuing to develop coding skills acquired in ICM

Prerequisites: Introduction to Computational Media (ICM) or equivalent programming experience is required.
About Luisa Hors: https://www.luisapereira.net/