Category Archives: Class

Decode Delhi

Tarana Gupta

Decode Delhi is a crowd-sourced social platform to quantify the city of Delhi. The goal is to develop a digital assistant that can help a person navigate and discover various aspects of the city while traveling safely from one point to another.

http://taranagupta.com/#/decode-delhi/

Description

Security is supposed to come from government agencies but in countries like India, with large and crowded cities like Delhi, it is hard to ensure safety.

With the growth of Internet and access to smartphones, opportunities have arisen to harness collective efforts of citizens who can improve quality of life in cities by simply disseminating the information they already have.

Through crowdsourced data, Decode Delhi makes an attempt to improve the experience of living in Delhi – the political and cultural capital of India- especially for girls and women. It covers three major aspects of navigation: safety level of different neighborhoods, knowledge of interesting places and street smart tips from fellow Delhiiets.

Twinkle’s Vacation

Yang Jiang

Twinkle is a whimsical camera that has left his owner to start his very own vacation – a journey to discover himself in this big world. As he travels, he invites others to help him discover the duality of moments both transient and enduring.

Description

For me, photography is more than a hobby or a career. My camera travels with me always, helping to get at the essence of others at particular moments in time..not a cold machine or emotionless object. But I am so busy at ITP, I can't travel. My camera was restless. I thought: what if my camera could go on a journey alone and experience the world in its own unique way? I created Twinkle, a cute hand-made, programmable camera built with a Raspberry Pi. Twinkle travels the world, meets people, and invites them to help him document moments of life, both transient and enduring. Twinkle sends me photos of his journey and the moments he's encountered while I'm stuck at work. In this way, my camera becomes an extension of my vision once again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.