All posts by admin

Nancy Hechinger

The Path of the Pirate

Brett Peterson

In this exhibit children ages 2-4 embark on a quest to become a pirate. Along the way, they engage in activities that reinforce early childhood development milestones including pattern matching, sequencing, counting and motor control.

Description

This project was inspired by and created for my daughter. We love going to museums and play together. I wanted to create something fun for her but that also focused on her learning and development.

I designed and created three interactive experiences, each imagined as a portion of a larger exhibit, that are tied together by the theme of a pirate quest. Kids encounter these activities that challenge them to apply skills of pattern matching, sequencing and counting — all key skills in the cognitive development of children between the ages of 2 and 4 years. At the end of the quest is an opportunity for the children to create their own pirate flag and print out a temporary tattoo to celebrate their accomplishment.

Nancy Hechinger

There Is No Place Called Away

Ben Kauffman

Responding to the challenge of keeping all of my garbage for a month, I have designed a series of "personal landfills": objects and actions that bring the impacts of waste and landfilling into the context of the body and personal space.

Description

What would happen if, instead of allowing my garbage to be taken to a landfill, I kept it close? This question is the driving force of There Is No Place Called Away. The motivations of the project are to both learn about the workings of modern landfills and re-consider a facet of our society that is often ignored. Beyond an intellectual inquiry, it is meant to bring a subject often defined by distance nearer to my body. To carry this out, I have designed an installation of "personal landfills" to contend with one month of my garbage, both practically and philosophically. It features vacuum-sealed garbage pods, a mobile landfill, photographs and video, telling a poetic narrative of what it might really mean to throw our garbage "away."

Katherine Dillon

Woven Signals

Anne-Marie Lavigne

A textile composed of yarn treated with thermochromic pigments. When activated by interwoven conductive threads, the seamless and unified material is transformed, revealing a dynamic fiber interface.

http://emeteuz.com/Woven-Signals

Description

The project fuses new technologies with the fabrication techniques characteristic of traditional textile design to create functional fibers and integrated interactive textiles, specifically a woven display.

The textile is woven with a custom-made thermochromic cotton yarn spun with conductive copper thread. Designed patterns incorporate channels for low-power current. The generated resistive heat catalyzes the dyed fibers to change color and reveal hidden, programmatically-controlled content.

Woven Signals is inspired by the mutually informative histories of textiles and communications, and aims to investigate a fiber’s ability to transmit information and emotion through visual and tactile interactions.

www.emeteuz.com

Katherine Dillon

We’re Still Here

Andrew Cerrito

The beginning of a series of ordinary, normally unnoticed objects that have evolved personalities and habits based on their original functions.

Description

Why should our sleek, sexy, status-symbol gadgets get all our attention?

We're Still Here is an exploration of the ordinary objects in our lives that perform their duties day in and day out without much acknowledgement or conscious thought from their users. Each object in this collection is modified to display surprising behaviors or personality traits that are derived from how it normally operates; the series begins with a neurotic, overly needy alarm clock and a dutiful-yet-exhausted coatrack that just wants to catch a short break.

By giving personalities to these objects, I'll playfully invoke a new way to look at and think about the myriad commonplace, "boring" tools that quietly contribute to our lives.

Nancy Hechinger

Growing The Internet of Everything

Andrew Sigler

I wanted to make a large assemblage of connected every day objects, but that was beyond my budget. So, first, I made my own homemade wireless microcontrollers.Then I designed an intuitive in-browser interface to connect my objects together.

Description

My thesis is a collection of found objects turned connected, each simple on their own, but reimagined through their links. Homemade wireless microcontrollers are built for each device, done at a fraction of the cost of ordering online . A touch interface allows users to patch links between separate objects, using any browser. Combining affordable production with easy links gives way for heightened experimentation while making the internet of everything.

Katherine Dillon

TacTag

Andres Taraciuk

TacTag is a fast-paced, technologically enhanced physical game. It features a more direct interaction between players than traditional videogames: players have to face each other, move and try to make or avoid physical contact between them.

Description

It is a physical game, made possible by technology.
Each player wears two kneepads and gloves, and tries to make or avoid contact with the other based on a rock-paper-scissors mechanic.
The format is an installation-style game, to be played at exhibitions like Indiecade, or at children's museums. Its main audience is gamers. The goal of the project is to show gamers that a different type of games can be made with technology: games that don't necessarily rely on a screen, but instead involve direct contact between players, and make them move around instead of just pressing keys on a joystick.
The scope for thesis is a two player game, but rules and technology where thought to be playable by two teams of 2 or 3 players per team.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Navigating the Really Real

Allison Burtch

How do humans remain spiritually and emotionally authentic in the face of impending societal and environmental collapse? My thesis is an invitation to be alive and present. It is liberation technology.

Description

A browser plugin that deprecates your internet experience.
A cell phone jammer that blocks signals.
A browser plugin that clarifies power structures on the internet.
A receptacle for all signals.

I find that many solutions using technology are accomplished through destruction rather than creation.
As such, one Firefox add-on slowly deprecates the internet, removing images, links and text until there is nothing left. The cellphone jammer used in the woods provides a gap in space, a place where people might eventually find something to say. The other Firefox add-on clarifies; it appends corporate sponsors to brands and politicians, providing complex information about power.
You can view my work at www.allisonburtch.net.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

The Art of Living

Alexandra Coym

A smart remote scheduling device for setting daily reminders to make life more comfortable for people living at home with early-stage Alzheimer's.

Description

There is no cure for Alzheimer's, and most available devices that aim at making daily tasks easier are intrusive for the daily routine and a constant reminder of the disease the person lives with. 'The Art of Living' seamlessly integrates this technology into people's everyday lives. Family caregivers can set up reminders through the web and upload images and sounds that, in line with recent medical research, can subconsciously trigger memories and thus enable the person to remember things on there own (e.g. make a phone call), leaving them feeling empowered and independent. Environmental sensors in the home tell the system if the reminders have been completed and otherwise trigger a more proactive prompting should this not be the case.

Kathy Wilson

VidCode

Alexandra Diracles

VidCode is a website designed to ignite girls' interest in computer programming through video art. Users can choose video filters, learn how they are built in JavaScript, edit them within a responsive code editor, and then share their creations.

http://vidcode.herokuapp.com/

Description

VidCode aims to create a conversation and a community of coders among teenage girls. The idea is to pair a medium in which they are already fluent—creating video content—with learning to program. VidCode also allows teenagers to be social as they learn about code: to take videos of their life, edit code with friends, and share information with each other. In my research I found that girls' interest in CS increases when they can pair programming with self expression. The experience begins by creating a video, uploading it to the site, then editing it by scrubbing values, mixing and matching filters such as "grain" or "blur". In the future, advanced video programming tracks will be available in algorithmic art, motion, and storytelling.

Katherine Dillon

The Book of Frank

Adam Quinn

A noir, future fiction story that grows as you read it.

Description

This is a transmedia project involving text, video, mobile interactivity, easter eggs, and puzzles. The Book of Frank is the first of a three part series that follows our hero (Frank) into a world he never knew existed. The story is a platform to explore possible futures and scenarios focusing on surveillance, based on current realities, trends, and technologies. As the story unfolds, the reader gets access to: Video clips of characters and events in the story, fictionalized web sites from the story, and real web sites that document current technologies and events. For each discovery of a character, group, event, or technology, the user is given a new page in a Dossier that provides extended breadth and depth to the story.