Category Archives: Class

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."