Category Archives: Class

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.

Kathy Wilson

Networked Dinner

Michael Milazzo

Networked Dinner is a TV Dinner re-invented for the twenty-first century. It provides an opportunity for users to produce a meal from start to finish, soil to table, with everything they need in one convenient, non-industrial box.

Description

Networked Dinner is a new kind of meal-in-a-box that can be used in the home of a user. When they open the box, which is branded with a satirical twist on the design of the original TV dinner, they'll find a "tray" that looks similar to a traditional TV dinner. In the place of a pre-cooked meal they'll find nursery pods holding a protein, starch and vegetable. The laser-cut tray will be assembled into a planter, to which they'll add soil, their seedlings and water. Over the course of the growing period, they'll monitor their meal's status with the help of a detailed guide that is customized to fit the crops that are included. When the crops are ready, users will harvest and prepare their meal, to be enjoyed in the company of loved ones.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Cinder-Game

Ryan Bartley

The barrier of entry to programming low-level game design is too high. Cinder-Game seeks to destroy this barrier by allowing people to program high-level, low-level and extensible C++, while also learning proper game design techniques.

Description

Recently, video games have developed as a strong artistic and independent storytelling tool. However, the game engines available today are either too high-level to be realistically used, or too low-level for the creative coder. With my thesis, I bridged the gap by building out the high-level and low-level components of game engines on top of the creative framework, Cinder. The library includes a scene graph, physics, graphics, and multiple managers for cameras, 3d audio, saving state, rendering, scripting and effects that will make the process of creating a fast/stable game less tedious. The library will be open-sourced to support learning, to allow extending and to facilitate others looking for the same creative outlet.

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.

Katherine Dillon

Ecstatic Computation

Michael Allison

Ecstatic Computation is the union between human and machine (when thought becomes bit) explored through a mythopoetic lens that includes virtual reality rituals, mystical infographics and other computation related artifacts.

Description

As I become a cyborg though corporeal and mental appropriations of computational tools, what then of my metaphysical relationship to these new "bodily" members?

Through my research I've encountered many religious, spiritual and scientific practices that seek to make sense of the relationships between our minds, bodies, spirits and the universe. Some practices contain the notion of ecstasy, which in existential terms means to achieve a state of being outside of one's self. Using virtual reality, my project explores the moment of Ecstatic Computation: the merging of consciousness and quantum energy in the physio-chemical registration of state within the computer's memory. The moment when thought becomes bit and electrons become ideas.

Heather Greer

Wrap Genius

Sam Slover

Wrap Genius is a personal journey into better food labeling. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases, recorded the data, and created a new visual framework to better make sense of it all. It's my dream food label.

Description

The food we buy matters. As our food systems become increasingly complex, the food we choose to consume affects not only our own health, but also the environment, our ethical framework, the Earth's biodiversity, and so much more. But much of the data of our food purchases remains opaque to us as end consumers. This isn’t good enough. So, I went on a mission to come up with something better. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases and created a new visual framework to better understand it all. Where does my food come from? What are my healthiest and unhealthiest choices? Which foods have GMOs? My dashboard shows me all of this information and more. It's my dream food label, designed for the interests of the consumer.

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.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

log(me) : vibe calculator

Michelle Cortese

The average human selects 15,000 words to speak each day and lacks a clear concept of their cumulative value; log(me) is a discrete wearable that scans and archives daily speech patterns to visually codify spirit, truth and power.

Description

log(me) falls somewhere between a Nike+ FuelBand for words and a diary for a generation without pens. It's a necklace, small and abstract in design, and an iOS app, discrete and stylish. A reconsideration of the defunct digital diary, log(me) does not wait for written input; instead, it listens for function word patterns and uses their ratios to determine spirit (mood), power (confidence), and truth (honesty). The results live in the app, via three in-app displays: an abstract vibe graph, a stark stats page and an archive. Constantly running, log(me) provides a logarithmic, automated, and chic approach to self reflection.

language #thequalitativeself #fashiontech #privacy #objectivity #reflection #empowerment

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Adventures of Teen Bloggers

Sam Brenner

Come face-to-face with the online identities of thousands of former teen bloggers. Choose a character from the annals of LiveJournal, an all-but-defunct blogging site, and lead them on the most epic of journeys: a walk down a high school hallway.

http://www.teenbloggers.net

Description

The Adventures of Teen Bloggers combines the aesthetic of old-school graphic adventure games with the vapid, self-obsessed musings of teenagers circa 2005. Players pick one of millions of LiveJournal users to re-animate and lead on a walk through a high school hallway. When asked to interact with another character, players discover the strengths (or weaknesses) of their character: they can only say things that the LiveJournal user actually said on their blog all those years ago. By dredging up a LiveJournal user's blog posts, once written under the semblance of privacy but now free of context and wholly public, I will draw attention to the permanence of our lives on the internet and question how we choose to share what we share online.

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.