We are now witness to the rise of an entirely new type of computation - quantum. The quantum computer can quickly complete calculations that take supercomputers much longer. IBM, Google, Alibaba, Microsoft etc. have debuted major quantum computing programs. IBM-Q (IBM’s project) is now accessible to the general public. The design industry is following suit. Quantum skills are in demand, and this need is expected to accelerate. As artificial intelligence represented next generation skills 10 years ago and is one of the highest-paid careers today, quantum computing represents the future generation of hi-tech skill. Students in the “Collab: Quantum Computing” course will learn about quantum computing and apply it to real projects. No previous tech skills are required. The course will cover the fundamentals of quantum physics and quantum computing, including superposition, entanglement, interference, qubits, unitary operators, measurement and the quantum circuit model. The students will create quantum circuits using Open Quantum Assembly Language (OpenQASM), execute the circuits using real IBM-Q quantum computers, and interpret the results. Students will design and program quantum computer software using an open-source framework- Qiskit. The course will investigate the possible applications of quantum computing to art, design, education, and business, with special emphasis on fighting bias and inequity within society. Students will undertake both individual and group projects. IBM will provide the class access to its quantum computers via the cloud. The class may take a field trip to IBM’s quantum computer laboratories. Again, no previous tech skills are required.

This course focuses on imagination as a mode of inquiry and as a site of political creativity. We will build on long standing work on the sensorium to expand conceptions of the political, providing students with the opportunity to generate new imaginative possibilities. Approaches include building a research practice that involves walking, archiving, mapping, multimedia and sensory-oriented fieldwork, speculative storytelling, and practicing material synaesthesia. Grounded in a series of site engagements, the course will foreground sensorial literacies and methods of ‘observation’ that include but go beyond the visual, developing mimetic capacities and embodied modes of understanding and relating. We center collaboration and cooperation as essential modes of inquiry and practice. Possible sites range from a sewer grate to local waterways and sidewalk trees to botanical gardens. We will look to living systems asking what the natural world can teach us about mutual aid, recovery, and restoration, while emphasizing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), queer and non-binary perspectives, and multi-species cosmopolitics. We will work collectively to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, practices, and narratives that make it difficult to shape the world and our futures in ways that center justice. The class is co-taught by faculty from across the university–Barbara Adams, Victoria Hattam, and Jane Pirone – each of whom has rather different but overlapping interests and backgrounds. We come together to create an experimental learning space from which we will imagine alternate presents and future possibilities.

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, Blueprint, Playmaker, Rhino and 3D Studio Max. Open to: All University graduate students, and undergraduate juniors and seniors. Some seats have been reserved for MFA Design & Technology students.

What’s a museum? We think we know, but the museum experience has evolved dramatically over the last century, and especially over the last ten years, in large part due to how technological innovations have changed the ways that we consume and engage with information. This course will explore many different types of museum, from curated to crowd-sourced, from physical to virtual to mobile, from passive to active and even performative. And do it all in New York City, home of over 100 official museums (and many more unofficial ones). We’ll discuss how audience expectations and experiences have changed, recent arguments and strategies to decolonize museums, and how museums have adapted to and been changed by technology. Students will learn how to use traditional and innovative tools for storytelling and interactive engagement, how to integrate physical and digital for more immersive experiences -- and how to create a museum anywhere, about anything.

Five of New York City’s universities are partnering to defend and support journalism and independent news media --- one of the most critical elements of our democracy --- as they are increasingly under threat. This unique, first-of-its kind program and collaboration will bring together Cornell Tech, Columbia University, City University of New York, New York University, and The New School -- in partnership with the NYC Media Lab -- to investigate and understand the various threats to journalism and media, and attempt to address these challenges using design, engineering, and computational methods and techniques. The effort will gather graduate students with backgrounds and expertise in journalism, design, and engineering/technology from these institutions in a special course to kick off in Spring 2018. In addition to the course, a speaker series hosted at news organizations around the city will launch in October around the themes of the partnership, featuring influential figures from media and technology. Inaugural media participants that will host fall programming include The New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed, and the HuffPost. See https://www.techmediademocracy.nyc for more information. Open to: All university graduate students and upper-level undergraduate degree students.

Reimagining Healthcare is a collaboration with the World Bank Group (WBG) Health, Nutrition and Population Division’s Service Delivery Innovation Team that invites students to design, experiment, and prototype novel frameworks and systems to address inequities in the complex health system ecosystem. The WB Service Delivery Team sits at the nexus of program design and systems innovation with the focus on supporting client countries on scaling innovative service delivery models into large-scale health programming to shift toward more adaptive, inclusive systems that can achieve sustainable results. This class is collaboratively taught by Ayo Okunseinde, Elizabeth Ann Mitgan and Jumana Qamruddin.

In this course we will explore the vocabulary, technique, opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration as an active creative process. The focus and application will be the question of how we relate to both the world around us -- as it represents itself in sensory and tactile form -- as well as the virtual world of the internet. At this moment in time, we will be exploring specifically how to create a shared space that brings us together as creators, performers and audience that can be immediate, intimate and ultimately expansive enough to be inclusive no matter where we find ourselves. Both in creation and performance, we will attempt to reflect, juxtapose and critically investigate the way the "real" and "virtual" world shape our perceptions. This course continues a brand new inter-disciplinary collaboration that began between The New School for Drama and Parsons Design & Technology and now the New School Community at large which will: apply performance principles to design based work; apply design principles to performance to create theatrical installations and performance art. The course will culminate in a “open” event that will accessible to the public.

This course will have two goals: first, to provide students with a practical overview of machine learning technology, including readily accessible online platforms as well as more sophisticated toolkits, and second, to investigate the application of machine learning to various types of urban media. Students will create experimental projects that can be installed at locations across NYC. The class's end goal will be to produce ML projects (art, architecture, and design) that take the urban environment into account, and augment that environment in interesting and meaningful ways. Students will work in groups to create installations that will be focused out of the classroom—across the university campus, within city parks, or at interesting urban locations throughout the city. In combination with the machine learning work, the class will study and investigate New York City. Cities can be understood as living organisms with multiple dynamic systems at play via live streaming data that represents the “urban metabolism”. Ai, machine learning, and generative design allow us to create design and art projects that support the evolution of this smart city. We will explore the theory and design application of predictive analytics, scenario modeling and simulation to assist in anticipating how live urban data can be manipulated and applied to create meaningful and effective media installations. No prior experience is necessary—this class will welcome students new to ML as well as those with prior experience.

In this 16-week collaborative and production driven course, students and faculty will begin to explore the intricate relationship between digital and physical fashion set in an immersive future. The curriculum is focused on researching and prototyping digital and physical fashion for immersive environments which includes proof of concept prototypes that students will create on Roblox. Students will first learn to apply Roblox’s Layered Clothing System to create inclusive 3D digital apparels that fit any body type. Secondly, students will have the opportunity to work with experienced fashion designers from both Parsons and Roblox communities to push the experimental nature of digital fashion for our future presence. Ultimately, they will be able to create a retail experience with their digital and physical clothings and accessories in a Roblox+Parsons pop-up experience.

Description Coming Soon

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.

This course will explore the interplay between perceptual psychology and the design of interactive systems and games. Students from psychology and design will learn a variety of useful concepts from perception research and interactive design, including how to make interactive digital games and experiences. Together, we will explore questions such as: how do humans perceive the world? How do our interactions in games reveal underlying systems? How is “intelligence” perceived in artificial agents? And how do we understand each other through perceptual cues? We’ll develop experiments using simple programming environments and tools (Javascript/Python and Unity) to study how people interact with, perceive and understand artificial worlds. While some experience in these tools and programming languages will be helpful for this course, it is not necessary, as long as there is a willingness to learn the basics.

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 March 3 from 4-7, Saturday March 4 from 10-4, and Sunday March 5 from 10-4), followed by the Copenhagen collaboration from Friday, March 10 through Friday, March 17. The class is co-organized by game studies scholar Jesper Juul (KADK), social practice artist Nancy Nowacek (Stevens Institute of Technology), and MFA Design & Technology faculty member John Sharp.