Category Archives: Class

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.

Nancy Hechinger

Dat(um)a

Hanbyul Jo

Dat(um)a is an art series that navigates the individual story within the scope of a big dataset.

Description

Data is getting bigger and bigger. An overview of the data gives a complete picture, but not the full story. 'Gentrification of New York City' is one example. My goal was to reveal the individual stories that make up the dataset–the datum within the data. First hand interviews about gentrification (the datum) were combined with income level change over 6 years (the data). The result is a series of sculptures that spotlights what is missing inside an averaged overview of data.

Katherine Dillon

CHI Juice

Hanna Moon

CHI Juice is a mobile application to make healthy home-made juice with suggested ingredients from Traditional Chinese Medicine methods. It helps to find good ingredients for your body and checks up health status of your internal organs.

http://chi-juice.com

Description

CHI Juice app is a self-diagnosis system with skin conditions. Chinese face mapping is part of Traditional Chinese Medicine and brings forth the idea that different parts of your face correspond to specific internal organs. So you can check out your problem areas and the underlying imbalances. This app detects positions of acnes or pimples on your face and gets data from Chinese face mapping to determine which internal organs are related to the positions of the acnes.Then it would show you ingredients which contains nutrition what your body needs to consume. Then you can select ingredients you want to add to your healthy juice. It shows amounts of each ingredients you need to put and has its own nutrition facts related to the ingredients.

Nancy Hechinger

Emulative Emergence

Hannah Mishin

Emulative Emergence is an installation of networked kinetic sculptures comprised of three units imbued with individual emergent traits. The installation responds to viewers by emulating either fear, fatigue or attraction on an architectural scale.

Description

Emulative Emergence is based on the biological concept of Emergence and is inspired by flocking algorithms and cellular automata of pixels — of what can be done computationally on a screen. I have recreated those possibilities with modular physical units unified into an architectural kinetic installation. A responsive piece, Emulative Emergence exhibits pseudo intelligence via hard-coded behavioral traits based on users' proximity and velocity. The materiality and movements of the piece are biomimetic in form and function. Each unit is networked and communicates its status (fear, attraction, fatigue) to the others. This project is intended as the first section of a scaleable immersive art installation.

Nancy Hechinger

Life as We Know It

Asli Aydin

The piece is an exploration of the Quantified Self Movement and the representation of personal data. A journey into the self through quantitative and qualitative data, which is based on my experiences during my father’s battle with pancreatic cancer.

Description

Through a series of life-logging techniques, the project aims to ask questions such as: Why do we collect data? Does it tell us something we don’t know about ourselves? Does it change our behavior? I tracked myself as my father went through cancer. I wanted to discover whether or not my data could tell the story of my experience. Can I frame it to express emotion? The more I tried to put it together, the less I felt like it connected to my experience. I decided to create a book that compared the two states of my data during the process of death and how I felt.

Katherine Dillon

Walking to the Moon

Ilwon Yoon

Walking to the Moon(WM) is a mobile RPG game that is a hybrid of game design and activities tracking apps/devices. The game turns walking experience into an adventurous PRG game, and users progress the story with their steps and fun game play.

Description

Self-tracking devices/apps are gaining a lot of popularity from mainstream, yet many of users find themselves failed to motivate to change behaviors and keep using devices/app for long term. What's the reason? I found this is not an issue of devices/apps itself, but the ways that they display data in plain numbers and graph. In order to solve this, WM brings a new approach to data as an element of game. In other words, WM tracks users' steps data and turns this data into required game resources to play the game. To progress the game, users need to collect their steps. Besides, the narrative of the game will offer an engaging game play to users, and this design will help users want to walk more for fun. Walk more, play better.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

ComicDrop

Jay Zehngebot

Quickly Create Comics using Artwork From Everyone.

http://www.comicdrop.com

Description

ComicDrop fuses a simple set of drawing tools with carefully considered workflows to facilitate fast, playful, collaborative comic-making.

At ComicDrop's core is a shared library of user-contributed drawings, called stickers. These artworks are free for everyone to collage with, build on, and incorporate into their sequential stories.

Designed and developed by a printmaker with years of teaching experience, ComicDrop's streamlined processes present an opportunity to engage visitors of all ages. Whether through writing, drawing, or composing compelling narratives, ComicDrop offers creative avenues for makers of every type, and allows participants to share the components of their comics with other artists the world over.

Heather Greer

Pleashare

Jing Zhao

Pleashare is a web application that provides sex toy reviews for Chinese users. It encourages them to share their experiences and start conversations about their sexual pleasure.

Description

Recently, Chinese women are becoming more open to sex, but their awareness of their own sexuality is still evolving. Sex toys help women’s sexual exploration, Pleashares helps them establish their sex identity and personal words in sex and sexuality discussion. With Pleashares, users can review sex toys, see other user’s exerience of body exploration with sex toy, and build conversations based on collective hashtags. Through understanding how to get pleasure from their own bodies, women get to know themselves on their own and not just from others.

Katherine Dillon

Mindful Units

Jess Jiyoung Jung

Mindful Units is a visionary model of a connected home designed for a single occupant of a small living space, such as a Micro-Unit apartment. It aims to transform the many constraints of this lifestyle into a more positive and productive experience.

Description

Do you live in a city alone? Is your room smaller than a subway car?

The trend of single individuals living in micro-sized apartment units is quickly becoming commonplace in urban areas worldwide. It is necessary to rethink the very concept of a living space in order to adapt to the unique challenges that this lifestyle presents.

To do so, Mindful Units implements physical computing and network technology in order to make a connected living space with increased mindfulness of its occupant. It assumes that connected interaction between a habitat and a dweller can improve quality of life through memorizing his or her daily habits and giving tangible guidance.

Kathy Wilson

VENT NY

Jon Wasserman

A dedicated virtual space for New Yorkers to vent and express their dissatisfaction with New York.

Description

It would seem unnecessary to create an outlet for people, New Yorkers no less, to express themselves given the social media landscape. However, this dedicated space for anonymous self-expression and civic reflection has a niche purpose. Utilizing flow theory this site nurtures the range of social commentary, superficial to profound, without the gravitas, friction or obligation of forum involvement.

VENT NY serves as scapegoat, megaphone, burning effigy, bilge pump and litmus strip.