Jorge A. Brake

A mobile app that encourages serendipitous exploration and discovery of city neighborhoods.

Description

Serendicity is an attempt to upend the normative travel experience. Travelers often have a specific destination in mind when they arrive to a new city. Rather than taking the fastest route there, why not explore a more interesting one? Leveraging open APIs and frameworks, the mobile app generates walking routes based on location, time, and preferences. The end result: less structure, more serendipity, and hopefully a different travel experience.

Justin Lange

A study of the history of objects that extend human limbs in dance, their problematic LED corollaries in contemporary EDM ("electronic dance music") culture, and the creation of a new Light Instrument that affords dancers artistic choice.

Description

LEDs wands, poi, hoops and other "light-up" instruments and toys constitute a desired aesthetic in EDM culture, but as tools for individual movement-based expression, they are no more expressive than a flashlight. Most LED devices have only two states ("on" or "off"), or offer preprogramed sequences. Several state-of-the art POV ("persistence of vision") devices allow custom images to be uploaded, but none allow immediate control over LEDs' expressive potential, such as luminance or hue. To encourage light dancing that is not simply pretty but also expressive, I created a new hand-held kinetic instrument with onboard sensors and controls that allow dancers to spontaneously generate and display novel light patterns while dancing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

GJ Lee

A game about hiding.

Description

BETULARIA uses polarity and hiding to challenge a player's sense of awareness.

The player must adapt to a changing environment by maintaining invisibility both to themselves and their predators.

This game was inspired by the studies conducted of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) over the past two hundred years.