Are there uses for Augmented and Virtual Reality design technologies beyond their role in creating entertainment products? Can AR and VR tools be utilized to help create more livable and sustainable future? The primary audience for VR today is gaming, but there are a wide variety of industries that benefit from the application of VR and AR technologies in their professional processes. These include architecture, urban, interior, product and industrial design, and medical education. This Co-lab explores how VR and AR technologies can be applied to the design of more livable and sustainable cities. Each semester the students choose an abandoned or under-utilized, real-world site, and using AR and VR technologies - along with additional study in urban planning and design – create new and engaging environments. This course explores the history of immersive media; pioneers of VR; current applications of VR; the relationship between AR and VR, and extensions of VR that connect it to the real world. It also teaches principles of “placemaking,” experience design and developing communities using Smart City and APA (American Planning Association) guidelines. Students will work in a variety of platforms depending on their own backgrounds and interests. Authoring platforms will be Unity and UnReal Engine and modeling platforms will include SketchUp, Blender, Cinema4D, Rhino3D and 3D Studio Max.

This course investigates visual communication as a vital tool for analyzing and narrating the built environment, focusing on how images construct meaning across architectural and urban scales. Taught as a virtual classroom bridging New York and Mexico City, the course uses its own cross-institutional structure to explore how physical distance impacts spatial communication. Students will blend theoretical inquiry—drawing on spatial thinkers like Arnheim, Berger, and Bachelard—with hands-on production across analog, digital, and AI-generated media to develop a personal framework for visual storytelling. Operating as an iterative studio, the class emphasizes peer critique, skill-building workshops, and collaborative practice. The semester culminates in a joint final project where students are paired across institutions to design both a structural element and its accompanying visual narrative. Whether producing a documentary video essay, an interactive spatial narrative, or a multi-format publication, students will build complementary skills in spatial visual literacy that directly support their primary work in architecture, urban design, experience design, and related fields.

This course is an experiential/embodied/multisensorial exploration into human | non-human collaboration, communication, relationship, co-existence and co-creation. As an introduction to living systems, a transdisciplinary framework that integrates the scientific/biological, cultural, social, economic, environmental and ecological dimensions of life, we will critically re-frame and position design process vis a vis the urgent and emergent contexts related to climate change and social/environmental justice, while disrupting the dominant processes and methods of human-centered design using speculative and critical approaches as catalysts for alternate ecological imaginaries. Students will have the opportunity to contribute to existing projects and/or develop their own line of inquiry, while weaving in their interests and disciplinary perspectives. We will engage and learn with numerous organisms and technologies, from slime mold and physical computing to dinoflagellates, plants, and generative AI. No previous technical experience is necessary to thrive in the course, just an open and experimental attitude. Throughout the semester, we'll be delving into queer, cybernetic, natural-historical, indigenous (TEK - traditional ecological knowledges), afrofuturism, ecofeminism, post-humanism, deep time, scale & energy, transhumanism, and many other theoretical perspectives, concepts and ideas, and strive to be comfortable in the discomfort of operating in conditions and contexts of volatility, uncertainty, emergence, un-knowing, ambiguity, and complexity as we seek an understanding of a multispecies cosmopolitics. IMPORTANT SCHEDULE INFORMATION: During the semester, we will meet on three (friday or saturdays) in Sept/Oct from 10:30-3pm on (Fridays or Saturdays), often traveling to various locations throughout NYC. The other 10 sessions will take place during our scheduled course time on Wednesdays. Please consider this schedule carefully, to make sure this course works for you. Attendance during field/lab experiences is compulsory. Biodesign Challenge If you’re interested in participating in the Biodesign Challenge Studio in the Spring Semester, (biodesignchallenge.org), this course is a strongly encouraged preparatory experience, especially if you have minimal experience in Science. MATERIAL FEE: $200

The Biodesign Challenge is an international program engaging over fifty schools and universities through an extensive resource and learning platform and within a large community and network of scientists, designers, and theorists. The Summit takes place in June each year, and is a competition, symposium and showcase of student projects that explore biotech’s entanglements within society—in the way it empowers people, contributes to structural inequities, and creates opportunities for change. Past winners from Parsons include Order of the Biodivine, TomTex, BacToYou, Betting on Babies, and others that have gone on to various international exhibitions and platforms such as the World Economic Forum. Bio-informed techniques are spreading into the design of every part of our daily lives, including materials, textiles, medicines, social critique, art, food, tools, processes and everyday products. Today’s designer must become fluent and engaged with this critical new domain that includes a range of transdisciplinary approaches, from bioengineering and biotechnology, to bio-art, biomimicry, biofabrication and biodesign. Through this course, we invite participation of students and teams at The New School to develop biologically informed intervention(s) that are socially, environmentally, and critically engaged. We will work with you to examine, develop and advise projects/research directions that intend to inform future designers to work with biotech thoughtfully and ethically. Projects should critically push the limits of current industry/practices and provoke new ways to design for the future. This course is multidisciplinary & collaborative. Students will work in teams throughout the semester, and while some of the work and investigation will be conducted individually that work will be contributing to a larger whole.

Can play be found inside the social forms of daily life? Can the creation of playful experiences function as a research method to better understand the communal and the social? Can the creative research process itself become an object of play? Working with graduate students at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design (KADK), we will explore these and other questions by creating play experiences that serve as both creative research experiments and as social play experiences. The course will employ creative research strategies derived from social practice art, participatory design, the iterative design process, systems design, and other fields to expand notions and values of play. The course will begin with a workshop at Parsons (Friday from 7-9:40, Saturday and Sunday from 10-4), followed by the Copenhagen collaboration on the following days. The class is co-organized by game studies scholar and KADK faulty Jesper Juul, social practice artist Nancy Nowacek (Stevens Institute of Technology), and MFA Design & Technology faculty member John Sharp. This course is by permission only. Please reach out to John Sharp for more information: sharpj@newschool.edu. This course involves a participation fee of $400. Students will cover their own travel to and lodging expenses in Copenhagen. Some materials, breakfast, and three dinners are covered by the participation fee.