This course consists of a series of three workshops, which explore contemporary positions in Communication Design, taught by specialists / working professionals from industry. Each workshop is 5 weeks long and examines a specific topic in detail. Topics include (but are not limited to) type in space; digital typography and prototyping; and design systems. Further details of the individual workshops will be posted soon. Students are expected to engage in all three workshops and must be present for the duration of the semester.

How would we use technology to imagine new ways of preserving potatoes? Or, if the spicy chili pepper goes extinct, how would technology remind us of the textures and tastes of a Sichuanese hotpot kitchen? Could you even imagine tacos in a world without corn? Immigrant Food Futures, a unifying evolution of gastronomy, aims to bring together cultural perspectives of how we can prototype new ideas behind the way we produce, package, transport, plate, cook, consume and dispose of food. In this course, students will understand the context and realities of immigrants and their food in the United States. Students will learn from topics like agriculture, farmers knowledge, climate change and the current political environment. Students will put into practice expressive points of view about the past, present and future of society in relation to food. In this course, students will be given short readings, podcasts, articles, documentaries and recipes as weekly assignments. There will be discussions, guest lectures, off-site cooking workshops and constant critique to inspire student concepts while improving their technical skills and design practice. Students will be expected to work on prototyping, development and deployment of their concepts.

These courses are special topical electives, often taught in new or experimental subjects, and rotate frequently.

What can a machine be beyond a rigid construction of minerals and metal? Traditional computation, industrial machines, cybernetics, and algorithms are all modeled on “dry” mechanisms expressed in the binary bit, the electrical on-off signal, and the grinding cog. Can a machine instead be a fluid and ecologically engaged entity, modeled from or connected directly to a living network? Inspired by the versatility of living forms found in nature, this course seeks to create sensitive, flexible, and sustainable machines. We will look at how machines can derive energy from renewable “clean” energy sources and focus on key properties such as growth, symbiosis, adaptation, self-organization, and decomposition. Through experimentation and hands-on workshops, students will research novel approaches to machine-making: soil, solar and wind-powered machines, machines that listen and talk to plants, fungi, and bacteria, wet and squishy circuits, and biologically-inspired forms. Practical skills covered will include: basic electronics and prototyping, computer programming and physical computing, mold-making, introductory soft robotics and biosensors, and fundamental biological techniques. Finally, students will become familiar with diverse practitioners (designers, artists, scientists, roboticists, etc.) operating at the forefront of biohybrid, biomimetic, and biologically-inspired machines. This is a making-focused and experimentally-based course. Students will personally choose and explore a subcategory of wet, soft, or biohybrid machines, culminating in a final machine design and fabrication. Final projects will be presented in a public group exhibition, demo, and research symposium.

How can something look political? How can something look feminist? How does propaganda create its audience? In this class we will examine aesthetic choices for their political meanings. We will deconstruct cultural artifacts including animated propaganda, advertising, feminist video, avant-garde film, and internet memes to discover tactics and concepts relating to their explicit or implicit politics, including labor & collaboration, technofuturism, anonymity, and handmade art & aura of authenticity. The course will be run like a lab—with students experimenting and producing projects at a fairly quick pace. Emphasis will be on critical engagement with ideas; we will read a variety of artist essays and philosophical manifestos relating to the politics of aesthetics including works by Marlon Riggs, Linda Nochlin, André Breton, Mira Schor, and Naomi Klein. Alongside studio projects, students will write short artists statements explicating (or obscuring) their aesthetic decisions.

“What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?” Aaron Bastani The effect of automation on labor is a central concern of our time; the fear of robots taking over our jobs inundate the media and threaten our survival as workers. Both classical and radical economics have recognized capitalism’s propensity to replace labor with machines. Theorists such as Peter Frase and Aaron Bastani have provided contemporary projections of post-work societies. Many others predict that there will never be a post-work future with the need for the reproductive work of maintaining the machines, and individuals. This course is about imagining the future of workers, when work itself ceases to exist. It is not about predicting what is to come with the extremity of automation, but about interrogating the ‘what if’. What are the values and belief systems in a post-work landscape? How are pleasure and leisure transformed? What will happen to social and biological reproduction? How will a post-work existence affect the relationship between humans, machines and environments? In this class, we will examine key cultural expressions of post-work societies in film, theory, and architecture, and attempt to narrate a new history of the world with the eradication of work as its genesis. Reading discussions, writing exercises, and prototyping will culminate in a final individual or group project which are critical, and yet ‘utopian’ in nature – a self-reflexive look at post-work futures that escape our current fears and anxieties of automation.

This course will introduce students to the subject of machine learning and its applications in the field of design, particularly for creating interactive web applications that enable the semantic exploration of datasets. Students will gain a top-level understanding of the history and current state of machine learning, as well as an understanding of the frontiers of data organization for image, text, and audio. Additionally, this course will explore the philosophical and moral implications of emerging machine learning technologies and their impact on society at large. Valid outcomes from the course may be tools, products, or art, and may focus on practical or conceptual/critical applications. This is a hands on technical course using Python, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Students will be expected to keep up with the technical demands independently.

The efficacy of an artwork often depends on the successful transmission of an emotion, sensation, or idea between artist and audience. The same goes for the efficacy of artistic documentation. In this course, students will learn about experimental methods of documenting their artwork, ranging from physical objects to performances. What elements of an artwork should be documented? How do we preserve ephemeral artworks? Can documentation be an artwork in itself? How do we document artworks in non-visual ways? How does an artist’s intent inform a project’s documentation? This course will examine the role of memory in art by focusing on the importance of documentation throughout art practice. Students will learn about the role artistic documentation plays in the preservation of culture. Students will also learn how to document ideation processes, basic photography and lighting skills, audio documentation, creative mapping, and documentation methods for public space. In addition, students will learn how to express narrative through both visual and non-visual sensory methods as it applies to their own artistic practice.

Laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC plasma cutters, CNC routers, and pen plotters all enable the translation of digital files into physical, material form. In this course, students will use code to create generative designs for digital fabrication. How does data change when it is translated into physical matter? How do digital fabrication tools work—and how can they be controlled with custom code, or built using physical computation? How can these tools be combined with code to create meaningful artifacts, interfaces, and enclosures? How can 3D prints and laser cuts themselves be used as matrices for casting or printmaking? This course will examine the translation of data to physical form through multiple lenses. Data-driven digital fabrication may be used to create narrative objects, physical archives, or customized products. Students will consider dance, choreography, motion capture, and robotics. They will look at material histories, and explore material creation through 3D printing. Digital Fabrication is a project-based course that will support students in developing physical fabrication skills. Each student will develop a portfolio of experiments that will inform larger-scale pieces. Students will use programs and libraries including paper.js, OpenScad, Gcode, p5.js, and ml5.js to create forms for laser cutting, 3D printing, and other CNC machines.

Are you a designer? Then you have to know how to make great videos! From Google to IDEO, video documentation and evaluation became the standard practice throughout their design projects. It is extremely crucial for the creative persons to utilize videos and filmmaking in their creative process from the ideation, iteration, experimentation to presentation. Students will learn how to use videos as a TOOL to help elevate a simple idea into a successful project. They will experiment with various types of creative videos such as video sketches, video prototype, video documentation to a pitching video. It will be scrappy, fast pace with hacks and short-cuts that get the students into making great videos. The class will cover the essentials and fundamentals of filmmaking, then introduce you to the more advanced cinematic techniques and storytelling. All levels are welcome, 99% making, in class demos and professional guest lectures.

In this seminar we will discuss topics of transit, surveillance, captivity, fugitivity, planning and design as formative components to life within the African diaspora. We will look at authors such as Frantz Fanon, Simone Browne, Mabel O. Wilson, and Jackie Wang to expand on the intersection of race, economics, technology, and mobility. The structure of the class will primarily consist of lectures by faculty and guests, group discussions and critical w ritten assignments. Using these authors we will build a creative and imaginitive way of thinking through ethical concerns that are an integral part of contemporary life. The subject matter will range from the history of surveillance as a racialized practice, the unequal access to resources created by land organization and urban planning, and the expansion of the private prison system.

This course is designed to teach both technical and artistic aspects of Projection Mapping to create experiential art installation work. Experiential Art is an immersive and engaging form of art which connects viewers to the artwork by creating interaction and relationship between the artwork and viewers. Increasingly more and more artists are working together with various institutions such as museums as well as companies to create experiential marketing campaigns and a brand activation. Projection Mapping is one of the most popular media to produce experiential installation in which the basic idea is to make buildings, the walls or objects come alive in light, color, and motion by projecting moving images onto them and used for various medium including museum installation, storefront display, product presentation, fashion show, music concert, large-scale outdoor installation, Street and Guerrilla marketing, an interactive kiosk and theater performance. The main focus of the course is not only to acquire the necessary technical skills to produce any Projection Mapping work but also to learn how to use the media effectively to bring their concepts to reality and to create the experiential and immersive installation. By the end of the course, students will learn 2D and 3D projection mapping techniques by using MadMapper and Modul8, and to operate necessary hardware to create projection mapping installation work as well as mobile live projection on the street. The students can also combine with their other technical knowledge such as OpenFrameWorks, Processing, and Unity3D to create interactive installation work.

This course consists of a series of three workshops, which explore contemporary positions in Communication Design, taught by specialists / working professionals from industry. Each workshop is 5 weeks long and examines a specific topic in detail. Topics include (but are not limited to) type in space; digital typography and prototyping; and design systems. Further details of the individual workshops will be posted soon. Students are expected to engage in all three workshops and must be present for the duration of the semester. — Workshop 1: What Did The 2010s Look Like? (Nika Fisher) Workshop 2: Voice Activated: Commands and Interfaces (Lukas Eigler-Harding) Workshop 3: Generative Identity (John Provencher).

How is the creative process affected or limited by our relationship with material? Current developments in the realm of materials science and biotechnology are challenging conventional distinctions between matter and life, inorganic and organic, passive object and active subject. From design studios to laboratories, from micro to macro, what possibilities can emerge from collaborations between living things and the synthetic creation of new, active materials? In this project-based course students will research and explore a range of unconventional materials, including: organic and synthetic, bio-inspired and robotic, and actual living organisms. Through rigorous research and hands-on workshops, students will develop a scientific, yet playful and alchemical approach to material exploration. Students will be guided to combine a range of high and low tech sculptural, digital, and scientific fabrication methods (mold-making, laser-cutting, 3D printing, CNC, growing, etc.). The class will collectively navigate the tension between long-term stability and environmental sustainability, especially as these concerns are related to living, organic, and biodegradable materials. Finally, we will look at designers and artists who practice alternative approaches to materiality, object making and knowledge production, by working with unorthodox materials such as skin cells, electroactive bacteria, or bioluminescent algae. This is a practical, hands-on course. Students will personally choose and explore a number of materials, culminating in a published open-source materials archive. Final projects will be presented in a public group exhibition and research symposium.

Social Media Studio is a part-seminar, part-studio course that critically reflects on human communications through a history of the web, and explores alternative modes of social gathering and community organizing through collaborative projects. In the seminar portion we will focus on issues of agency, privacy, and consent in online communications. In the studio portion we will employ a participatory design process to develop micro forms of social media using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Through a co-creation of the students and the instructor’s collective experience, this course serves as a space to experiment, intervene, and prototype alternatives for a more equitable web.

In this hands-on studio class students will learn the essential tools and techniques of pop-up book design and paper engineering. During the first half of the course students will be familiarized with paper mechanisms by building examples of each mechanism for themselves. In the second half of the course, they will apply those techniques to construct multi page pop-up books based on their own designs. Lectures throughout the program will introduce students to different forms of pop-up book storytelling and narrative used throughout history.

This course investigates the potential of coding as a form of self-expression. The dominant forms of computationally-driven digital media operate by defining our identities for us and mining our selves as data. This course seeks to evaluate and experiment with the potential of code and the interface as media for self-definition and artistic practice. Artists and writers throughout history have explored the means by which their art forms construct, deconstruct, subvert and disseminate individual and group identities. Through readings, discussions, writing and project-building we will explore how code, the interface and the Internet create engines, visions and networks of the self and selves. Readings will engage a variety of creative and critical perspectives on representations of the self and identity from contemporary poetry, fiction, history, critical theory, and visual art. We will study how writers and visual artists harness their chosen forms to represent and imagine individual, lived and collective experience. We will read critical texts that situate the "I" within computational media, and examine how data and computation drive our culture, and by extension our sense of self. The central question of this class we be: what does it mean to have a voice as a writer of code? How can a program or application express and include new perspectives and point-of-views through its programming, data architecture and visual design? All acts of coding reflect the assumptions, biases, experience and ideologies of the coder on some level, often leading to outcomes that are termed unconscious, unintended or unexpected. This class will seek to bring these biases and ideologies to the direct and conscious level, and collectively develop approaches for building more inclusive and polyvocal forms of code, data, visual and interactive experience. The basics of code will be introduced through Processing/P5js and we will embark on projects that speculate on, represent, express and imagine the possibilities of coding new voices and perspectives.

In Experimenting with Shaders students will explore the potential of graphics programming with shaders—specialized programs that run on GPUs which have the ability to render graphics extremely fast due to parallel processing. This course will cover the basics of shader programming, GPU graphics pipelines, common shader environments and applications, and mathematics common in shader programming. This class will utilize an experimental format including a required weekend crash-course at the start of the semester and a mix of faculty- and student-led meetings. Students will create a series of one-week exploratory projects followed by an independently proposed long term final project. This will be a demanding technical class, students should have an intermediate level of experience in coding and should be strong in at least one procedural programming language such as Javascript, OpenFrameworks, or C#.

Currents: Computing Textiles (A Hands-On History) is an interdisciplinary course exploring the complex history and speculative future of technology by way of the history (and future) of textiles and craft. Students in this course will develop skills in circuitry and coding as they relate to the construction of textiles. They will also develop skills in textile construction such as knitting, weaving, and dying as they relate to technology. Practical skill development will be accompanied by a deep practice in historical and theoretical research and writing. Discussions will include themes of gender, race, and society and students will be encouraged to challenge conventional history. We will examine the value society places in its tools and what that means for the objects they produce and we consume. In this course, we ask students to consider how we define technology, who can create technology and how the evolution of technology has shaped the world we live in. We seek to understand how the tools we create now will affect our relationships to each other and our environment in the future.