Category Archives: Class

Heather Greer

Glance

Natasha Dzurny

A simple kinetic display for personal information, at a glance.

http://just-glance.com

Description

With the mass adoption of smartphones, wearables, and apps that collect personal data, so much is being tracked. Glance builds on the quantified self market to enhance the way collected data influences its users. It makes information more available, more relevant, and more beautiful by placing simple, iconic displays in meaningful places. Glance is a kinetic wall piece designed as home decor and includes a configuration app for multiple data sources. Using basic geometric shapes, the display is read quickly at a glance. As the smartphone slips away from the center of the digital ecosystem, look to Glance for a relevant display of knowledge, understanding and inspiration.

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."

Heather Greer

TACHI

Fang-Yu Yang

Tachi is a toy bundle that combines tangible toys with a customized mobile application. Tachi creates a platform to encourage preschool children to make their own toys and to physically interact with the story.

Description

Creativity blooms in 4-6 year olds. It is also an important time to learn graphic, sound, speed identification and self-discipline. Tachi integrates the physical and virtual worlds, providing kids a new way to explore traditional tangible toys in the digital era.

Tachi consists of two parts: tangible toys and a tablet application. Kids can make animal faces with Play-Doh using a special acrylic base and customise them by decorating their faces with light pipe components. When kids move and rotate their own animal face on the Tachi tablet app, they create animal sound effects and graphic animation and also get light feedback on the animal's face. Finally, kids can generate their own animal's song with a recording and composing function.

Nancy Hechinger

The Path of the Pirate

Brett Peterson

In this exhibit children ages 2-4 embark on a quest to become a pirate. Along the way, they engage in activities that reinforce early childhood development milestones including pattern matching, sequencing, counting and motor control.

Description

This project was inspired by and created for my daughter. We love going to museums and play together. I wanted to create something fun for her but that also focused on her learning and development.

I designed and created three interactive experiences, each imagined as a portion of a larger exhibit, that are tied together by the theme of a pirate quest. Kids encounter these activities that challenge them to apply skills of pattern matching, sequencing and counting — all key skills in the cognitive development of children between the ages of 2 and 4 years. At the end of the quest is an opportunity for the children to create their own pirate flag and print out a temporary tattoo to celebrate their accomplishment.

Kathy Wilson

ControlEase

Gal Sasson

ControlEase is a node-based graphical programming environment that provides an easy and intuitive way to control, interconnect and prototype programs by providing both textual and graphical programming elements in the same environment.

Description

ControlEase is the result of my own exploration of graphical node-based programming environments. This environment differentiates itself from other node-based environments by providing the required tools to easily connect to running programs, interactively set and change different parameters in those programs, and interconnect different programs. This environment enables the creation of nodes that are aware of other nodes on the canvas and can independently connect with them. This feature allows for greater interactivity when prototyping, and blurs the distinction between prototyping and performing. This tool also provides textual programming capabilities within the environment itself, allowing the creation of custom nodes on the fly.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

OkCarl

Carl Jamilkowski

How would you build a better dating site/app? OkCarl is a research study that tests out how different demographics interact with certain dating site features.

http://www.okcarl.com/

Description

OkCarl is research into how people interact with online dating websites. The success of Tinder demonstrates that smaller, niche dating sites/apps use methods and features that can successfully be applied to the general population.
OkCarl started with researching what these unique features are, then ran experiments to see how participants react and use the features. The experiments collect many data points, serve up surveys to get participant feedback, and allow for participants to run them on their own. It is no frills design-wise, as to not introduce a bias.

Kathy Wilson

MonsterF

Ge Ma

MonsterF is an Augmented Reality game run on Google glass. It use Google glass camera to take the video and then do face detection at real-time to track people's face and replace them into cute monsters. Also can use hand to play their monsters.

themonsterf.com

Description

MonsterF is an AR game run on Google glass. The whole process can divide in to several parts.

1) Realtime Video Taking. Video shot by google glass.

2) Real-time face detection. This game will use JAVA-CV, automatically get all the face in the video, and replace the face a different monster face

3) Users can finger squeeze, stretch, flick monster face, they all can active different effects.

4)Sound and music system

PS:

1) About UI: Because Monster is a game. So the interface will be design very cute and funny, also its very simple and easy to play

2)About UX: User Experience will designed Simplicity and compact, wonderful game and app always very easy to understand and play

Kathy Wilson

Night Witches: based on a true story.

Caroline Sinders

An interactive cross-device story built for mobile and web utilizing interaction design, story telling, and video game mechanics. This is about a real woman named Nadya Popva, a WWII female Russian fighter pilot in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

Description

Night Witches is an interactive transmedia and cross device story told through a mobile game and an interactive website laden with information and hidden easter eggs. NightWitches is based on a true story about a WWII Soviet Female fighter pilot named Nadya Popova. NightWitches is built in Unity for the mobile component. By combining game play, interactive video, and audio, I want to create a story that firmly places the user in the role of a NightWitch and explores where interactive story telling can go- beyond making slide shows. I aim to explore, and observe how users can follow the non linear story and the cross device mechanic as well as create an educational and factual but interesting and fun interactive story.