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"Sygnómi"

Alexia Kyriakopoulou

Sygnómi (Greek for “I’m sorry”) is an interactive VR experience exploring the memories of a victim of domestic abuse. Sygnómi attempts to explain and educate the audience about the depth and complexities behind domestic abuse in more nuanced and unexpected ways.

http://www.alexiak.com/category/thesis/

Description

Based on my personal experience with domestic abuse, I realized that there is a big gap between people’s perceptions of domestic violence and the reality of these situations. Unfortunately, the traits of domestic abuse are so counter-intuitive that attempts to look at it through the lens of common sense can actually drive you further away from the truth.

Research has found that a lot of people still believe that domestic violence happens elsewhere. It is often believed that it only happens in families of color or lower socioeconomic status. Another common misconception is that victims that experience domestic violence won’t leave their partners because they are fiscally dependent on them.

Through my project, I attempt to combat these misconceptions by creating a VR experience which tells the familiar story of a couple who used to be really in love and how it devolves the relationship into one of abuse and violence. The experience is based on my personal story as well as stories from victims I have interviewed and researched. In this experience, I choose to focus not on the event and traumatic experience of the abuse per se (i.e. beating, violence etc.) that most VR experiences have portrayed so far, but convey what domestic violence looks like from the inside in terms of cultural expectations as well as behavioral and gender paradigms. Through this experience I am emphasizing that a major reason that victims stay in abusive relationships is because they tend to create an illusion of their relationship and they keep going back to the perfect/fairytale moments they once had out of denial with their partners instead of accepting the more painful but honest truth. Abuse victims are looked at and judged from the outside in; “Sygnómi” offers a view from the inside out.

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Living Canvas

Nathier Fernandez, Shreiya Chowdhary

Living canvas is a living sculpture. A map that explores [ITP] cohabitation and the impact of a shared microbiota. Its main purpose is to visualize the invisible organisms and recognize patterns through data, sample collection and [bio] material.

http://www.nathier.com/living-canvas-update-1/

Description

How can we make the invisible visible? How can we make our approach to microbes and bacteria more amicable and meaningful? How to spark a healthy discussion? Art could help take away the “ick” around this organisms and change the way we relate to them. Living canvas is a map that explores [ITP] cohabitation and the impact of a shared microbiota. Its main purpose is to visualize the invisible organisms and recognize patterns through data recollection, sample collection and [bio] material.

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BioDesigning the Future of Food

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Breathe With Me

Samantha Schulman

Breathe With Me is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety.

https://www.samanthaschulman.com/2018/04/17/breathe-with-me/

Description

Anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million Americans, many of whom suffer from panic attacks. Panic attacks are unpredictable, debilitating episodes typically characterized by shaking, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and intense fear. The combination of fear and physiological symptoms continues to heighten one another, escalating the panic attack. Paralyzed with fear, one’s breathing becomes short and shallow. While some strategies for coping with anxiety involve meditation or medication, I want to offer a new solution, one that transforms the anti-anxiety techniques of both diaphragmatic breathing and applied deep body pressure into a garment that could be worn anywhere.

The result, Breathe With Me, is is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety. The user squeezes a hand-pump to inflate two air pockets that hug their chest and back, providing comfort in the application of gentle pressure. The hand-pump itself is soft and tactile, shaped to match the form of a person’s hand, and absorbs muscle tension to provide stress relief. The repeated squeezing of the pump combined with the soft compression develops a pattern that simulates deep breathing, guiding the user to practice breathing together with their garment. Essential oils are also dispersed with each pump as an additional calming element.

Furthermore, in creating Breathe with Me, I challenged myself to try to uphold environmental ethics when selecting materials, despite the lack of resources available for fast and affordable sustainable production. My final prototype is made with soft white cotton fabric by the way of vintage laundry bags, and silicone, which is non-toxic throughout its entire lifecycle when properly developed.

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Let Me Give Light

Yunho Choi

How can light and emerging technology create a more empathetic society?

Description

Let me give light is a series of augmented reality environments that repurposes ancient lighting technology in a modern context, inviting audiences to a meaningful and connected experience from their everyday life.

For the first part “Let me give light” is about giving light to our everyday light bulbs with meaningful interaction. The second part “Let us give light” invites users to an interactive light playground which aims the sense of enlightenment as well as deeper emotional connection.

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Manifest Energy

Jasmine Soltani

A series of artifacts that explore the limitations and opportunities for ecologically sustainable computing, with a focus on the energy consumed in the production of our digital devices.

http://www.jasminesoltani.com/energy

Description

The lifecycle of a product includes the mining and processing of natural resources, manufacturing, transport, product delivery, use, and its reuse, recycling or disposal. Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with production: the life-cycle up until the use phase. Manifest Energy is a series of lenticular stickers, a mechanical animation, and website that illustrate the life-cycle and embodied energy of digital devices.

Electronics are unique in that they have exceedingly high embodied energy, exacerbated by planned obsolescence, their difficulty to repair, lack of supply chain accountability, and the increasing ubiquity of computing. The energy economy, on which the ecologically destructive digital economy is based, is unsustainable in itself. Can illuminating the resource demand of our digital devices change our consumption habits, our relationship with our devices, the way we design and legislate their use, and handle end-of-life?

In addition to shifting the paradigm by which we think about energy consumption, I hope my project informs people of actions that can be taken. By extending the lives of our products through repair, we can reduce demand for new items. By developing more modular electronics, we can make these devices easier to repair. By putting pressure on companies and legislators, we can achieve greater supply chain transparency and improve the health of people working on or near production sites. By developing renewable energy sources and eliminating carbon emissions, we can mitigate the ecological impact of the production of digital technologies.

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Applying AR to Cardiac Rehab

Ran TIAN

"Heart health" is an argument reality health platform to deliver education and improve medication Adherence

http://www.tianrandesign.com/

Description

Through a visually rich AR experience, the Heart Health helps cardiac patients understand in layman’s terms the impact of the medication they are taking directly on their heart health, and improves medication adherence by gamifying medication management; it also provides heart condition monitoring by integrating apple watch’s heart sensor.

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Open Kinetics: Move, Play, Lean

Nathaniel Padgett

Open Kinetics are low cost kits that inspire learners of all ages to explore programming and electronics through movement-based play. The aim of Open Kinetics is to create an affordable, accessible, engaging platform that teachers can easily bring into their classrooms to foster technological agency in their students.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/journal2018/stefani/author/ngp249/

Description

An exciting aspect of the rapid proliferation of technology over the past decade is that much of it is open and remixable by anyone with access to a computer and the internet. This has created unprecedented opportunities for anyone to contribute to and use these technologies for research, to start businesses, or to make art.

But despite these advances, access to technology is still largely concentrated in the wealthiest communities. A major reason for this digital divide is cost. Open Kinetics addresses this problem with engaging DIY technology kits designed to be affordable and accessible. Students learn programming, electronics, and design by making a simple motion controller used to play free movement-based games that they can also remix and build themselves. Through building these kits, they learn to use technology for their own creative ends, developing technological agency and preparing them for careers of the future.

By pairing hardware with games, Open Kinetics kits give context to what students can do once they have built their controller. Open Kinetics give students a virtually endless array of experiences to choose from, whether moving a character, playing virtual tennis, or making kinetic art. Because these games are movement-based, they engage students in active, physical participation that facilitates learning. Built for kids ages 8-16 but great for all ages, Open Kinetics turn players into makers and empowers students to contribute to rather than simply consume technology.

One simple project for Open Kinetics is a twist on the Atari classic Pong. In this game has players move paddles up and down the screen to deflect a puck and prevent their opponent from scoring. Rather than using joysticks or buttons, players use the Open Kinetics motion controller they build to move the paddles with their arm movements, making a sedentary game into an active one.

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Commodity Fetishism

Miao Tian

The purpose of this project is to create an emotional linkage between overconsumption due to our social mentality and its harmful effect .

Description

Consumption is inevitable. It is in our nature and it is part of the whole ecosystem. However, excessive consumption is a social mentality. In our recent past, overconsumption was viewed as greed, a moral vice. In our current time however, greed is viewed rather differently. Living in our current economic society, we as consumers become further and further away from the production and waste department. Because of that consumption seems independent from the guilt of wasting someone’s hard work or polluting a piece of land somewhere. Consumers enjoy an exhilarating sensation by satisfying their greed.

For the project, instead of announcing statistic numbers of overconsumption and its effect, I’d like to have audiences experience it directly. I hope to generate an emotional linkage between our daily consumption life and the amount of waste we produce.

There are three players to participate three parts of this project: a shopper to a commercial shopping website; a consumer to a trash can controller device; a receiver to an interactive VR film. The shopping website represents the drive that pushes us to shop more and more. The trash can symbolizes the end of a product’s commercial life and the start of its waste life. The VR film visualizes waste that we don’t see. The shopper “buys” products and corresponding waste will show up in VR for the receiver. The consumer will step on a physical trash can and release the trash in VR. The receiver will endure the outcome, then the players can rotate and experience each other’s action.

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