These courses focus on ideas of collaboration, participation, social interaction, and play in the context of emerging technologies. Students from across BFA DT’s two programmatic tracks, Game Design and Creative Technology, will work together to research, design and build hardware and software projects geared toward facilitating participatory, playful experiences. Students will discuss concepts ranging from experience design to participatory aesthetics and the power of play in social context. They will research a variety of tangible interfaces and sensory inputs and outputs; exploring the ways in which hardware interfaces facilitate playful experience. Throughout the course, we will consider alternate histories to the arcade situated in critical context, and focused on unique, expressive, and social interactions. The co-requisite Studio and Lab Participation courses are structured to give students a fundamental understanding of how team-based interactive projects are executed in a professional setting. The Studio component focuses on concept, context, design methodology, and critique, while the Lab component focuses on tools, execution and design process. In Studio, lectures, reading, discussions and workshops will consider a multi-faceted history of play, social engagement and their impact. In Lab, demos and workshops focus on game programming workshops and overviews of hardware techniques. Assignments consist of readings, research, ideation, prototypes, and a polished final project.