Category Archives: Class

Heather Greer

bodyRef

Tiffany Hewlett

bodyRef provides guidance to users on how to set and accomplish fitness and nutrition goals by utilizing a team of healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Description

With the assistance of a healthcare professional, users create a health profile and allow bodyRef access to their tracked data. bodyRef will annotate data summaries provided by the tracking device. Users can then accept or reject individual annotations noted on the data summaries. Accepted annotations will trigger personalized advice from HCPs who provide medical guidance on how to achieve goals throughout the week. To start, the intended audience will be high-risk individuals such as those diagnosed with metabolic disease. Moving forward, bodyRef audiences will be expanded to special populations such as pregnant women and the elderly. Even further down the line recovering athletes will become targeted users as well.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Push For Fame

Yu-Ting Feng

Push for Fame collects stories about people in the form of a snapshot. The installation consists of a button, a camera and a screen. People take pictures of themselves, capturing and broadcasting their own stories at that time and place.

Description

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," said Andy Warhol.
Push For Fame is an interactive window display inspired by Warhol's quote.
It uses three basic elements – a button, a screen, and a camera –
to engage people to take pictures in five different public locations,
with the goal of encouraging people from diverse backgrounds to actively engage with their surrounding environments.
Push For Fame shows the egalitarian nature of public art and self-portraits in different public spaces.
I am using these four local design projects to explore different methods of encouraging people to express themselves and contribute to local discourse across languages, through their own self-portraits.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Lest We Forget

Todd Bryant

Lest We Forget is a video sculpture that serves to remind human kind about their impact on the earth while counting down to the end of the current civilization via their own devices – over population, climate change, depletion of natural resources.

Description

Lest We Forget is a video sculpture that serves as a reminder of the destruction man is inflicting on the natural world around them. The project will count down to an estimated moment when civilization must change because society as we are currently experiencing it can no longer function. The end date will fluctuate in real time as data will be streaming from various international resources on the internet. It consists of three layered semi-transparent LCD video screens. The middle layer is the clock face which will be blurred out at the begin with and coming into focus as time is more relevant and precious. The outer screens will show a representation of earth rotating in real time that will crumble as we destroy the planet.

Nancy Hechinger

Where Animals Live

Yuliya Parshina

A portable exhibit that gets kids ages 4 to 7 excited about geography and wildlife, through physical exploration of a giant world map.

http://www.whereanimalslive.com/

Description

Where Animals Live is a roaming experience that pops up in parks, playgrounds, schoolyards, and block parties, to bring delight and spark curiosity about the natural world.

Participants explore a 20 ' x 12 ' world map and use clues to help lost animals return home, while becoming familiar with continents, oceans, and habitats. Electronics embedded in the animals provide real-time feedback when the creature is placed correctly. Young explorers walk away with booklets about their favorite animals, which can be used for further learning online.

An accompanying website prepares kids for the adventure through practice exercises and encourages deeper learning after the in-person activity.

Katherine Dillon

Pippin

Valerie Chen

Pippin is a themed hard cider bar that recreates a series of historical periods significant to the story of cider in America. As patrons navigate the space and engage in symbolic gestures, they experience being a different person in a different time.

Description

Apple trees are extreme heterozygotes: when grown from seed, instead of inheriting the characteristics of their parents, the traits of the new generation are wildly unpredictable. These capricious offspring are called pippins. Likewise, Pippin is a pop-up cider bar that takes on unpredictable forms. The entire space moves through three themes: an indoor garden paradise, a frontier log cabin, and an underground speakeasy. The themes correspond with historical moments that shaped the complicated relationship between Americans and the practice of drinking alcohol. The designs for Pippin's first iteration have been brought to life as a navigable digital environment where users can experience what such a place might look and feel like.

Nancy Hechinger

FLOW

Zhenzhen Qi

FLOW is a biofeedback-based 3D Virtual Reality game. Employing a VR headset, wearable sensor, and interactive gaming design, it creates a journey, through self-reflection, to detach from the physicality surrounding us.

Description

FLOW's VR headset and breath sensor system temporarily transports a participant into an alternative virtual world in the hustle and bustle of city traffic, human voices talking, laughing, arguing. Gradually, as the participant’s breath starts to deepen, the city noises are replaced by a soothing binaural sound-wave. The entire city is slowly submerged under an endless ocean gently coming to shore. The opaque sky of stress is washed away by the mild glow of sunset. Through deepened breathing, the participant manifests his or her inner calmness into a virtual sanctuary sustained by wondrous aesthetic harmony.

Kathy Wilson

(m)EatLess

Vanessa Joho

(m)EatLess is a mobile application that uses gamification to influence users to lower their meat and cheese consumption in order to help avoid climate change. The less meat you eat the healthier your green companion, Rimo will be.

Description

Our diets cause more greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry companies. According to the UN, meat production is one of the most significant contributors to climate change. (m)EatLess is a mobile application that is tackling the issue by using gaming tactics to influence users to eat less meat and cheese. Rimo is the character in the app whose health gets affected by the user’s activity level. The more green tasks completed each day the healthier he will be.

Kathy Wilson

Making Things Beautiful / Making Beautiful Things

Scott Garner

This interactive book is a philosophical, theoretical and practical exploration of the difficulties and delights associated with the human drive to create.

http://makingthingsbeautiful.net/

Description

This is an exercise in "writing to learn" as I attempt to codify a lifetime of lessons into a working philosophy for myself, for readers dealing with similar issues and for anyone else interested in the creative process. It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book on the subject, so I focus on aspects of creative work that I have found either particularly difficult or particularly rewarding. These ideas—such as perfectionism, inspiration and resonance—are supplemented by interactive illustrations, work by other creative people and quotes and concepts from artists, philosophers and authors.

Heather Greer

IJO

Vitor Freire

IJO is a movement that inspires people to dance in public spaces and engages them as part of a larger experience. It is an experiment in connecting people in different places through movements of the body. IJO means dance in the Yoruba language.

http://ijomove.us

Description

Imagine a group of kids break dancing in a park in New York and another group dancing Capoeira in a square in Sao Paulo. A body representation of each dancer is projected in both locations where either dancer can interact with each other. A dialogue is born between the participants and the interaction of the visual translation of the dancers. Move your body to tell who you are. 
Additionally, a fully customizable dynamic web data stream of the dancers movements is provided to all those interested in building visualizations and applications with the data. The visual component is accomplished through the use of Kinect sensors and projectors while Javascript is used to handle the data stream and interactions. 

Heather Greer

DiscoverED student collaboration through interactive syllabi

Sergio Majluf Jadue

DiscoverED is a web app for higher education teachers to create interactive syllabi in a timeline format. It simplifies course resource management and creates a online collaboration space for sharing, thinking and discussing class topics.

http://www.discover-ed.com

Description

The Internet offers a plethora of collaboration and general purpose management resources. The same is true for learning resources in the academic space. Yet most teachers still outline classes in static documents or hard to follow websites. DiscoverED is a new approach; instructors can use this interactive tool for planning courses and collaborative class activities.

DiscoverED renders syllabi as timelines, allowing multiple class units, content resources and milestones to be seamlessly added and managed by instructors over time. With this, students can navigate content and class progress as they zoom in and out, connecting everyone in a space to discuss and collaboratively create and share content.