Category Archives: Class

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."

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.

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

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.

Kathy Wilson

Keigibo

Harry (Chiu-Hao) Chen

Keigibo is a spherical device that captures motion data from the trace of its trajectory when people throw or drop it. Experiments include determining the best material for this "ball", testing the sensors, and visualizing the motion as animations.

http://keigibo.com/

Description

Keigibo is for everyone. It will be comprised of three major components: 1) motion sensor, 2) spherical object and 3) visualized data display. Keigibo will use a tiny Arduino-compatible Spark Core as a micro controller connecting with a motion sensor (MPU-6050). This motion sensor will be embedded in the spherical object to collect motion data as users throw or drop it. In form, the object will resemble a ball to make people feel more instinctively comfortable using it, but I will experiment with the material for this "ball", so it may not look and feel familiar. The relationship between human and nonhuman will be recorded, processed and augmented into a digitized visual representation.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Restart Motion

Christina Carter

Restart Motion explores the possibilities for creatively repurposing images abandoned in the digital world. Using images with common objects found on the web, Restart Motion is a tool for creating dynamic animations.

Description

We take pictures to capture a moment but when we upload them to the web, the moment is lost as the picture becomes one of many in a massive catalog of similar images. How can meaning and motion be restored to these abandoned assets? Restart Motion, currently based in openFrameworks, is a software tool for creating animations using common objects in found imagery. Inspired by the process of stop-motion and aperiodic pattern formation, Restart Motion applies the process of repetition to generate a visual form that is far more complex and interesting than its constituent parts.

Heather Greer

Last Eats

Colin Narver

When selecting a restaurant, more options doesn't lead to better choices. Last Eats is a mobile web app that helps you choose a single restaurant based on the culinary knowledge, passion and loyalty showcased by your friends and extended network.

http://lasteats.com/

Description

Most restaurant discovery apps operate with the idea that more options are better. Last Eats takes the opposite approach.

By constraining choice to the single most important meal in a given city, Last Eats enables you to demonstrate passion and loyalty towards the restaurants that help define you. Last Eats connects you with your friends and extended network and allows you to see and share your collective choices.

Through radical selectivity, Last Eats lets you discover the most essential, meaningful meals in the most useful way – one restaurant, one city and one choice at a time.

Heather Greer

BriteRise for Early Childhood

Courtney Nadine Coleman

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that creates a more personalized learning path by allowing parents and early childhood educators to track, visualize and communicate a child's health and growth data in real-time.

http://www.briterise.us

Description

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that allows parents, educators, and health professionals to become more aware of a child's overall wellness through the ability to receive real-time observational and objective data. The system not only allows for the manual documentation of a child's growth and development, but caretakers have the ability to obtain, visualize, and analyze physical data of a child from popular consumer heart monitors and other biosensors to get more objective data in assessing a child's well-being.

Katherine Dillon

We Go Together

David Lobser

A series of works exploring the miller moth migration of 1991 in Colorado.

Description

We Go Together is a story of instinct, travel and collisions of nature and technology. It consists of a series of works which unravel the image of the moth's attraction to light, the metaphorical meeting of minds, and the implications for understanding our own.

The pieces are generated with a custom javascript library which runs on the web.

Nancy Hechinger

Kinetisynth

David Rios

A multi-user musical interface and physical audio visualizer. Users interact with multiple controllers to create soundscapes and realtime physical visuals.

Description

Kinetisynth is part musical interface, part physical parametric display. Participants use various controllers and sensors to make music together and simultaneously control a real-time physical visualization of that music. It uses analog circuitry and MIDI to generate soundscapes while simultaneously analyzing and quantifying audio signals to create a real time mechanical frequency spectrum that reflects the soundscape.