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 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. 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

This course will be a travel collaboration between Parsons/The New School and IIT Gandhinagar near Ahmedabad, India. Students and faculty will engage at a distance during October and November 2025, and Parsons/The New School students will travel to Ahmedabad, India between January 2-18, 2026, staying and working at the IIT Gandhinagar campus. Students from IIT Gandhinagar will be primarily engineers. Students from all Parsons/The New School programs are welcome to join. Food and lodging in Ahmedabad will be provided by IIT Gandhinagar for a small fee. Students will be responsible for all travel costs. Course credit will count towards the fall 2025 semester. This Collaboration Studio will focus on the applications of AI to food systems, specifically in India. India and TNS students will work together to learn about system dynamics, design thinking and the application of AI and engineering solutions to local farmers and food suppliers. The seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) all interact with aspects of the global food system. Management, distribution, inputs, and outputs within social, cultural, political, ethical, and economies are essential to food system sustainability. Students will have an opportunity to frame these questions by undertaking projects that improve food systems and investigate how these systems might benefit from artificial intelligence. While in India we will visit, observe, listen, document, and analyze the needs of a local target population, while learning about various AI platforms. We will engineer and prototype solutions in various media to address needs that have been identified. Nutrition, hunger, and food accessibility from field to table will be the focus of research and study in both India and the USA. The outcomes and media of class projects will open-ended. The goal is to produce solutions that the target population can implement in their practices and in their daily lives. While in Ahmedabad field trips will be taken to local cultural sites, including the Gandhi Ashram, the Adalaj Step Well, the Walled City, and various museums. Weekends and some weekdays will be scheduled for exploration. No previous experience is required. Faculty permission is required. Please apply via https://bit.ly/AI_Ahm.

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.

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 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.

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 February 28 from 7-9:40, Saturday March 1 from 10-4, and Sunday March 2 from 10-4), followed by the Copenhagen collaboration from Friday, March 7 through Friday, March 14. 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 $500. Students will cover their own travel to and lodging expenses in Copenhagen. Some materials, breakfast, lunch, and three dinners are covered by the participation fee.

In this collaborative studio course, students will explore the intersections of AI, culture, technology, and nature, discovering how emerging AI and machine learning technologies can be used to understand, represent, and enhance our environment while confronting the challenges these technologies may bring. This course will be run in tandem with Parsons AI in Nature Symposium to take place April 10th-13th at Rensselaerville, NY’s Hilltown Commons (see https://www.hilltowncommons.org/). Students will work in teams to plan and conduct workshops and demonstrations for the symposium. These group activities will foster a sense of community and provide practical experience in coordinating academic events. Students will also work independently on AI projects to be presented at the symposium, allowing them to showcase their individual creativity and contribute original ideas to the discourse on AI and nature. Throughout the course, students will engage in critical discussions about the rapidly evolving technology of AI, the challenging social issues it raises, and its relationship with the natural world. Topics will include ethical considerations, environmental impacts, and the future of AI in society. As an alternate schedule course, students are required to attend three one-day weekend workshops early in the semester and meet regularly with faculty during the development of their projects and symposium events. All students will participate fully in the symposium. No prior AI experience is necessary, but interest and curiosity is a must. As an alternate schedule course, students are required to attend three one-day weekend workshops early in the semester and meet regularly with faculty during the development of their projects and symposium events. The dates of the Saturday workshops are flexible—however, students must be available for a majority of the April 10-13 Symposium dates (we will work with students who have Thursday or Friday courses to resolve conflicts).