Technologies of Protest is a Collab Studio course between Parsons' Design Technology department and The Africa Center (TAC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan, multidisciplinary institution that is radically reimagining the stories and structures shaping the lives of people of African descent in Africa and around the world. The organization is transforming narratives about Africa by centering human stories of the continent and its people in contemporary culture, policy, and business. This course offers students the opportunity to explore, through historic, contemporary, and geographic lenses, the technologies of protest. We will ask in what ways do individuals and communities utilize technology for activism and protests against injustices, whether via the body, organizational structures, print ephemera, telecommunications, or social media. We will study historic movements such as the American Civil Rights Movement and colonial resistance movements in Africa and The Caribbean. We will draw analogies to contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, Fees Must Fall, Shut it All Down, Zimbabwean Lives Matter, and EndSARS. We will investigate ways technologies are leveraged to support or impede these key activist movements. Students will gain a deeper historic and contemporary context for studied activist movements. They will come away with a broad definition of technology and implementation. Students will learn research-driven prototyping and making using an array of technologies. The course will culminate in a student-led symposium and exhibition in concert with TAC where students will be given the opportunity to present their ideas, works, and findings as a part of TAC’s digital programming.

Code, decolonized is a teaching practicum that investigates the ever-shifting roles of software and explore new forms of code pedagogy through queer, Black, abolitionist, and intersectional feminist consciousness. We will research, experiment, and practice new ways of learning and teaching programming languages for the web through perspectives that are traditionally overlooked and under-recognized in the technical classroom. Following bell hook’s vision of “education as the practice of freedom”, this course equips future-educators with tools to reframe their understanding of traditional computer science education and craft socially-engaged course materials. By the end of the course, we will culminate in an array of syllabi, collaborative tools, assignments, in-class exercises and present them through an end of the semester symposium students will facilitate and attend outside of class time. This COLLAB studio partners with the Processing Foundation, Emergent Works, and POWRPLNT and is well suited for students who are invested in pursuing teaching careers after graduation, as well as those looking to deepen their understanding of code and community work.

These are unique types of studio courses, pairing teams of students with industry partners to undertake real-world projects.

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.

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.

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 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. Upper level undergraduate and graduate students from any program at The New School are encouraged to apply. Team applications are encouraged.

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.

This collaboration studio will actively engage with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Innovation Service (UNHCR) and members of UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Network to explore storytelling and speculative fabulation as a practice of design. We will explore the capacities of stories to build relationships, challenge entrenched power dynamics, and prompt imagination beyond the representational. Engaging storytelling as a ‘cosmological technology,’ we will work together to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, and narratives that make it difficult to shape futures that center justice in organizational processes. With an emphasis on transformation, we will disrupt traditional storytelling practices and tropes through the use of cut-ups, recombinant narrative, visionary fiction, collaborative meaning-making, non-linear, and transmedia forms. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, Afrofuturism, drag and other performative interventions, this course explores how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. From alien kinship to the undercommons, we consider subversive responses to dispossession, marginalization, precarity, and the forces that foreclose or curtail the possibility of a future. We will be engaging intersectional themes such as ecological collapse, the politics of humanitarianism, belonging and identity, and living and complex systems.

This course is an exploration of techno origins and experimental sound. (alt)reality (esc)apes the constraints of the dance floor and reasserts sound as technology to alter the present and reimagine the future. What is a ‘rhythmanalysis’ of technocracy? What are the sounds of resistance? How do vibrations reorient and alter our consciousness? We will analyze the evolution of experimental practice at the intersection of race, gender, class, and technology. Our research will reference works by Juan Atkins, Drexciya, Black Quantum Futurism, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, John Akomfrah, DeForrest Brown Jr. and more. As an embodied practice of our research, we will collect, morph, and transform sounds into 3D environments. Our collective practice will contribute to a virtual, immersive soundscape featured on alternate realities for Dublab Radio. *(alt) reality is a collaboration, supported by Ableton and New Art City.

In this Collab Studio, The New School students will work in cross-disciplinary teams with public health students from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to assist Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Services (LSA). We will research, prototype, design, and document projects for pilot testing that address the needs of LSA and its constituents. Broadly, students will collaborate in teams to help Little Sisters increase capacities to address food insecurity in East Harlem. Methods come from public health (needs assessments, community-based practice, evidence-based interventions) and design (co-design, iterative design).

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.

These are unique types of studio courses, pairing teams of students with industry partners to undertake real-world projects.