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Heather Greer

TACHI

Fang-Yu Yang

Tachi is a toy bundle that combines tangible toys with a customized mobile application. Tachi creates a platform to encourage preschool children to make their own toys and to physically interact with the story.

Description

Creativity blooms in 4-6 year olds. It is also an important time to learn graphic, sound, speed identification and self-discipline. Tachi integrates the physical and virtual worlds, providing kids a new way to explore traditional tangible toys in the digital era.

Tachi consists of two parts: tangible toys and a tablet application. Kids can make animal faces with Play-Doh using a special acrylic base and customise them by decorating their faces with light pipe components. When kids move and rotate their own animal face on the Tachi tablet app, they create animal sound effects and graphic animation and also get light feedback on the animal's face. Finally, kids can generate their own animal's song with a recording and composing function.

Katherine Dillon

Growable Gown: a gown that grows with you

Erin Smith

A wedding dress is a perfect example of a non-sustainable, one-time use object. My thesis is a dress that will completely biodegrade after use, supporting new life in my garden instead of hanging in my closet for 50 years.

Description

The average cost of a wedding dress in the US is $1200 and contains nearly 8 yards of material. In addition to being cost and energy intensive, these dresses demonstrate the issues that surround so many objects that out live their intended use. This project explores using bacteria, fungi, and other biodegradable resources as building materials to create garments that are both beautiful and ecologically responsible. For my own wedding, I wanted to make decisions that I will continue to be proud of instead of having my decisions be dictated by tradition. I hope that this project will inspire others to grow their own sustainable custom gowns.

Kathy Wilson

Soil for the Air

Erika Hansen Miller

Soil for the Air helps regular people participate in co-developing a new approach to combat climate change by creating a platform for DIY soil biology experiments growing special carbon-sequestering fungi.

http://www.soilfortheair.org/

Description

Soil for the Air is a platform for a crowd-sourced research project, with a beautifully designed growing system and a community-building digital space for knowledge sharing. It invites citizen scientists to join me in continuing my experiments in cultivating a special kind of carbon-sequestering, soil-dwelling fungus in order to raise awareness of new solutions for climate change, and to help other people outside the science community feel empowered to make a difference. Soil for the Air is:

People harnessing the power of communal curiosity and knowledge sharing.

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Science performed at home to explore ways to combat climate change.

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Design that makes scientific inquiry beautiful.

Nancy Hechinger

iOre

Emily Wagenknecht

iOre- explores tech's origins, from the ground up.

Description

One of the first steps in changing our relationship with the environment and each other is awareness. iOre aims to increase awareness by creating ingredient labels for tech products that inform consumers of the materials and resources our technology relies on, starting with the iPhone. In addition each label will provide a link to a site that tells a bigger story. Who is affected? What role do i play in this cycle?

iOre, hopes to spark momentum behind understanding this cycle and its possible implications, opening the source, literally.

Nancy Hechinger

Good Care Calls

Liz Khoo

Good Care Calls is a proposal for a service that provides caring phone calls to reduce costly hospital readmissions. Volunteer callers check on the wellbeing of recently discharged patients to promote healthy behaviors and ease emotional distress.

Description

Every year, 2.6 million Medicare recipients are readmitted to hospitals at a cost of $26 billion. Using human centered design methods, I learned about the needs of patients and care providers to design a solution for reducing readmissions.

The neediest patients are often the most underserved. An effective solution must be affordable and quickly distributable, which is why Good Care Calls only requires patients to have a phone.

Patients opt-in to Good Care Calls at discharge, and their data is shared via the hospital’s electronic health record API. Students preparing for degrees in health services gain valuable experience as volunteer callers and also act as a triage service to busy clinics, flagging issues in the patient's EHR.

Katherine Dillon

“Emergence Unfolding”

Edward T. Button

My thesis is a design plan and presentation for a site specific parametric sculpture that utilizes local narratives in its procedural design.

Description

Through research, I created a comprehensive framework for site specific parametric sculpture. The framework uses parametric design and location narrative to create formal possibilities within a family of possible outcomes. This process framework was used to design a parametric sculpture for fabrication and installation in the atrium of 644 Putnam Avenue, a commercial office real estate development in Greenwich Connecticut. The design uses procedural growth algorithms and parametricly designed shapes drawn from audio spectrographs as if it had been grown from the location narrative. Fabricated utilizing Transitional Light Film, the sculpture interacts with the sun and architectural lighting to create an ever changing form and reflection.

Heather Greer

Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian

Donna Miller Watts

Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian is an immersive interpretation of the Jorge Luis Borges story, "The Library of Babel" via the Oculus Rift. The experiencer will move within the tale as it unfolds and comments on itself.

Description

Three-dimensional, physically interactive technologies such as the Oculus Rift are changing gaming and will change other forms of entertainment, including book publishing and theater. Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian utilizes numbers, letters, abstract shapes, lines, objects and animated text that change as the experiencer moves. Words and images derived from the text emerge. A reading of "The Library of Babel," will play over headphones, at times changing with the user's movements. Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian blends fiction, theater and physical interaction to offer a new art form for the the technological landscape of the future.

Nancy Hechinger

Kinetisynth

David Rios

A multi-user musical interface and physical audio visualizer. Users interact with multiple controllers to create soundscapes and realtime physical visuals.

Description

Kinetisynth is part musical interface, part physical parametric display. Participants use various controllers and sensors to make music together and simultaneously control a real-time physical visualization of that music. It uses analog circuitry and MIDI to generate soundscapes while simultaneously analyzing and quantifying audio signals to create a real time mechanical frequency spectrum that reflects the soundscape.

Katherine Dillon

We Go Together

David Lobser

A series of works exploring the miller moth migration of 1991 in Colorado.

Description

We Go Together is a story of instinct, travel and collisions of nature and technology. It consists of a series of works which unravel the image of the moth's attraction to light, the metaphorical meeting of minds, and the implications for understanding our own.

The pieces are generated with a custom javascript library which runs on the web.

Heather Greer

BriteRise for Early Childhood

Courtney Nadine Coleman

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that creates a more personalized learning path by allowing parents and early childhood educators to track, visualize and communicate a child's health and growth data in real-time.

http://www.briterise.us

Description

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that allows parents, educators, and health professionals to become more aware of a child's overall wellness through the ability to receive real-time observational and objective data. The system not only allows for the manual documentation of a child's growth and development, but caretakers have the ability to obtain, visualize, and analyze physical data of a child from popular consumer heart monitors and other biosensors to get more objective data in assessing a child's well-being.