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.

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.

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.

In this ONLINE course, students will design and prototype online multiplayer apps and games using p5.js and p5.party. Study topics will include UX/UI for multiple user software, multiplayer game design and playtesting, sketching and prototyping, client/server architectures, and team coding tools and workflows. p5.party is a library for easily prototyping multi-user experiences with p5.js created by the course instructor and still under development. Students will have the opportunity to work with and contribute to the library. For more information about p5.party see https://github.com/jbakse/p5.party This course will include a required mid-semester weekend game jam. Game jam participation can be online or in-person. This is an intermediate coding course. At minimum Students should have successfully completed an introductory programming course, have experience with p5.js, and have a strong interest in coding and javascript

Five of New York City’s universities, Cornell Tech (Connective Media), Columbia University (SIPA), Queens College CUNY (Media Studies), New York University (ITP & IDM), and The New School (Parsons School of Design) collaboratively investigate toward understanding how our information ecosystem impacts our democracies, with the goal of addressing these challenges using design, engineering, and computational methods and techniques. The effort gathers graduate students with backgrounds and expertise in media, journalism, design, and engineering/technology from these institutions. The course includes public lectures featuring influential figures from media and technology and provides significant opportunities to collaborate on relevant research projects with peers across graduate programs and disciplines. The course will be conducted mostly online with a few opportunities to meet in person on campuses.

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.