Speaking Shaders is an intermediate, digital development intensive course to teach the essentials of shader programming. This course is designed as two phases. In the first phase, students will code shaders that make images. This will go over the foundations of using fragment, vertex, and compute shaders to create imagery for screens. Students will practice shaders through topics like texture sampling, noise, lighting, procedural coloring, and more. In the second phase, students will work the other direction: translating images into shader graphics. For each week in this phase, we will develop and share custom shaders to meet the needs of our artistic direction, establishing a repertoire of techniques and strategies that can be used in all kinds of real time interactive engines. Through both sides, we will develop the taste and familiarity for shaders and images that we see in the world, and enable ourselves to speak the language of shaders. Coding is necessary for this course. Students must be comfortable reading and debugging code samples as well as actively seeking assistance when needed.

The Materiality of Machine Learning focuses on utilizing the systematic study of algorithms and turning them into a functioning model that can be implemented and actualized in the “real” – physical world. This course will be focusing on introducing students to different types of machine learning models, learning various algorithms and models that can uncover complex patterns, utilizing ready-made software, and learning how to implement them into a physical production method. Students will work in a variety of media depending on their own backgrounds and interests. In this course, students will learn how to interact with text, images, and 3D-based machine learning models and subsequently bring these created work into the physical world.

Experience design is an emerging field at the intersection of space, narrative, and interaction. It is medium agnostic but employs a suite of disciplines as tools — from the built environment to interface, service design to branding, performance to exhibitions. Experience design invites people to participate in a cohesive journey through multiple touchpoints, with the intent to inform, to incite action, to delight. Through lectures, collaborative studio projects, and hands-on workshops, this course will introduce students to the working methods and theoretical context shaping the field. Students will create rapid prototypes, schematic proposals, and site-specific installations at human scale. Project prompts will be open in nature, inviting students to dive into research, lateral thinking, and collaborative making.

They say practice makes perfect, so come practice making interactive media! In Playful Prototypes, every student is tasked to create one interactive prototype for every week in the semester. In the style of game jams, each week features a unique mystery theme, aesthetic, or constraint that will serve as a creative brief. We will playtest, share tips, and debrief our weekly sprints. Students will learn strategies to make and experiment with their ideas to discover the fun within—developing efficiency and taste as interactive designers. Here, students will create play… fast. Students should be at least familiar with one experience development tool such as Unity, Unreal, TouchDesigner, Processing, Figma, or similar.

This course aims to teach visualization of ideas through 3D modeling, computer animation, and digital sound production by using the digital realm as an autonomous tool while exploring digital aesthetics. The course explores viewport aesthetics, hyperunrealism, deliberate aliasing, 8-bit and pixel art, data-moshing, glitch art, the uncanny valley, vaporwave, algorithmic architecture, machinima and more. The emphasis of the course will concentrate around Cinema 4D, After Effects and Reason, but will also explore, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Resolume, and Processing.

Students will acquire advanced knowledge of, and be able to critically analyze content, form, dynamics and interactivity as it applies to data visualization. They will learn to conceptualize and implement dynamic, interactive design concepts for qualitative and quantitative data. They will create data visualizations using development environments and web-based programming libraries.

In this course students will learn the principles of accessible design. Full description coming soon.

This course aims to teach visualization of ideas through 3D modeling, computer animation, and digital sound production by using the digital realm as an autonomous tool while exploring digital aesthetics. The course explores viewport aesthetics, hyperunrealism, deliberate aliasing, 8-bit and pixel art, data-moshing, glitch art, the uncanny valley, vaporwave, algorithmic architecture, machinima and more. The emphasis of the course will concentrate around Cinema 4D, After Effects and Reason, but will also explore, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Resolume, and Processing.