This collaboration studio will actively engage with the United Nations Human Campaign 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.

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.

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.

Infinite Bodies challenges the perspective that posits the separation of mind and body. The goal of this course is to subvert existing norms that govern bodies and imagine radically new remote presence strategies that extend our bodies across time, space and culture. Run in collaboration with City University Hong Kong, students will form interdisciplinary teams across the Pacific to research and investigate strategies for empathetic interaction, alternate sensory input/output pairings and conceptions of mutable time and space. In the process, students will engage in personal and collective meaning-making to enable deeper understanding of different customs and a diversity of attitudes about the self. Combining technical instruction with a body of theories from disability studies, posthumanism, fashion, sensory play, subversion and performance art, students will build wearable systems with Arduino and web/device APIs, and create virtual experiences in Unity. Technical workshops in the first half of the course will inform a series of ideas in form prototypes and a final case study that connects bodies from different sides of the Pacific. Students will collaborate in physical and virtual contexts with equal facility to find strategies that enable empathetic, embodied communication between human bodies, between a human and a machine, or a human and another species. This course is ideal for storytellers and extreme creatives who want to explore novel techniques of remote collaboration and break new ground through the physical and digital representation of culturally diverse bodily narratives. Final projects will be documented and presented in a public virtual exhibition accompanied by completion of publication-worthy artifacts.

What is digital humanities, and why should it matter to designers? Digital humanities sits at the intersection of scholarship, traditional humanities disciplines, and computational work. As a field, digital humanities uses digital methods to study literatures, history, the arts, and other elements of human society and culture. It can be a powerful site of collaboration between scholars and designers. In this course, students will be introduced to concepts of digital humanities and given the opportunity to apply them to projects in collaboration with the Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities (IRLHumanities). IRLHumanities is a digital and experimental humanities workgroup that supports scholarly projects that take on digital forms. Throughout the semester, we will consider what the relationship between digital humanities and design is, and what it could become. We will converse with members of IRLHumanities about key elements of their research, design, and production work, and consider how scholars and designers can work together to make projects that are critically rigorous and provocative in their implementation. Projects will be collaboratively generated based on overlap between student interests and the general themes present in IRLHumanities work. At the end of the semester, students will come away with a grasp of key issues in the digital humanities, a sense of how they can integrate humanistic methods in their own work, and experience collaborating on projects that are grounded in scholarship.

The apparel industry has been going through a digital revolution for the better part of a decade. Before COVID-19 this revolution was moving at a slow and steady pace, but now digital ways of working are an immediate requirement for the entire industry. Using the latest in virtual design tools from Shima Seiki, students will address these challenges in creative and innovative research projects. Students are encouraged to bring a wide range of design experiences to the course, as we work together in an interdisciplinary fashion on challenges ranging from sustainability to social justice. The course provides students with extended textile and technology skills that support their individual design philosophy. In collaboration with Ralph Lauren Corporation, students will be presented with the challenges and opportunities that our new virtual paradigm has forced the industry to reckon with. Ralph Lauren will provide access to its rich design history and virtual prototypes for students to work with. A select number of students will also be invited to collaborate with Ralph Lauren and its global supplier network after the course ends to develop physical prototypes of their work. Such close collaboration with a large company will give students the opportunity to understand what happens when their design solutions are scaled up to address industry-wide challenges.

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.

Positioning as an experimental mobile UX/UI design studio, OnePlus is reimagining the future of mobile design with us. Throughout the semester, students will be introduced to the evolution of the award-winning hydrogen OS and its design process. They will find out a complicated operating system started somewhere simple and within reach. Students will also participate in real design challenges that OnePlus is facing in the speculative future. Students are responsible for researching these challenges in-depth and building radical prototypes with guidance and support from OnePlus's senior OS team based in New York City.