Category Archives: Class

Heather Greer

What’s your secret?

Tianran Qian

“What’s Your Secret” is an augmented reality installation that shares the stories of elderly woman. In the installation, the audience is presented with boxes and mementos, each with a live portrait and objects of the subject.

Description

Have you ever been touched by a beautiful smile of an older woman? It is the smiles that draws me in, making me curious about their life stories. What is it that they know that I don’t about life? What lessons can they share?
Since we live in such a busy time, can we get some wisdom from someone growing old gracefully?

My hope is that other women in similar life circumstances – young but starting to have to make adult decisions, living in cities, with the world seemingly ahead of us – can learn something from them.

The stories revealed in "What's Your Secret", share life's experiences – good and bad – and give people a choice of hearing the different parts of the story over time.

Heather Greer

White Box Emergency Communications

Pilar Zaragoza

White Box Emergency Communications is a radio-based emergency communications system that is accessible, affordable, and easy to use that can be deployed when modern communication methods are down during a disaster.

Description

Modern communication methods rely heavily on cell phone towers and internet connections, which, during disasters are either offline or reserved for emergency response and disaster management. How can survivors communicate their location and get the supplies they need? White Box Emergency Communications aims to solve this problem by repurposing an existing protocol, automatic packet reporting system (APRS), developed by the amateur radio community for emergency communications. By making APRS more accessible, affordable, and easy to use, it allows responders to see status updates, view GPS coordinates, and communicate independently with survivors via this long-established wireless technology.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

iCarbon

Tianyu Wu

The iCarbon is a houseplant gardening toolkit that indicates a user's personal carbon footprint data calculated through one's daily spending.

Description

Plants witness our carbon footprint daily. The iCarbon package provides a user with a resurrection plant and a toolkit that triggers an automated watering system. Resurrection plants have the ability to thrive when provided with water, but it also dehydrates quickly at the lack of water. The user's personal carbon footprint is calculated through his or her daily spending from his or her personal banking account. The system visualizes the user's carbon consumption using a real live plant and helps the user monitor it through an app. Furthermore, because of the user's emotional attachment to the plant, it nudges him or her to form a more responsible lifestyle.

Kathy Wilson

AQUA-BRIDGE

Youjin Shin

AQUA-BRIDGE is a web-based Information Communication Technology platform to help solve drinking water purification problems in Kiwalani, Tanzania by allowing effective communication with well water filter users and monitoring filter performance.

http://www.aqua-bridge.org/

Description

Tackling drinking water issues in developing countries with well filters has largely failed due to the limited field data on how successful the filters have been in reducing disease. Part of the problem has been ineffective communication between filter users in local villages and the project managers monitoring the filters. AQUA-BRIDGE will develop a streamlined system for logging water quality and communicating results between filter users and project managers via text messaging. In addition, a system of data visualization will be developed for project managers to use in data analysis and the public to view on the web.

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.