other nyu classes

E90.2983 - ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING 001 43675 W 08:55am - 12:15pm WS BARN 401 STU 3.0 JEREMIJENKO, NA sociology G93.3503 - RESEARCH SEMINAR: URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
001	>31202		T	12:30pm - 02:00pm	WS	295L 4156	SEM	4.0	KLINENBERG, ERI

itp fall 09

Applications of Interactive Telecommunications Technology

H79.2000.1 Call#71392

Tues 4:00pm to 7:30pm

Red Burns

This introductory class is designed to allow students to engage in a critical dialogue with leaders drawn from the artistic, non-profit and commercial sectors of the new media field, and to learn the value of collaborative projects by undertaking group presentations in response to issues raised by the guest speakers. Interactive media projects and approaches to the design of new media applications are presented weekly; students are thus exposed to both commercial as well as mission-driven applications by the actual designers and creators of these innovative and experimental projects. By way of this process, all first year students, for the first and only time in their ITP experience, are together in one room at one time, and as a community, encounter, and respond to, the challenges posed by the invited guests. The course at once provides an overview of current developments in this emerging field, and asks students to consider many questions about the state of the art. For example, with the new technologies and applications making their way into almost every phase of the economy and rooting themselves in our day to day lives, what can we learn from both the failures and successes? What are the impacts on our society? What is ubiquitous computing, embedded computing, physical computing? How is cyberspace merging with physical space? Class participation, group presentations, and a final paper are required.

Introduction to Physical Computing

H79.2301.3 Call#71429	Wed 09:30am to 12:00pm	Thomas Igoe
H79.2301.4 Call#71430	Wed 3:30pm to 6:00pm	Thomas Igoe
H79.2301.2 Call#71428	Wed 12:30pm to 3:00pm	Daniel O'Sullivan
H79.2301.1 Call#71427	Tues 12:30pm to 3:00pm	Daniel O'Sullivan
H79.2301.5 Call#71431	Thur 12:30pm to 3:00pm	Staff
H79.2301.6 Call#71432	Wed 6:30pm to 9:00pm	Rory Nugent

This course expands the students' palette for physical interaction design with computational media. We look away from the limitations of the mouse, keyboard and monitor interface of today's computers, and start instead with the expressive capabilities of the human body. We consider uses of the computer for more than just information retrieval and processing, and at locations other than the home or the office. The platform for the class is a microcontroller, a single-chip computer that can fit in your hand. The core technical concepts include digital, analog and serial input and output. Core interaction design concepts include user observation, affordances, and converting physical action into digital information. Students have weekly lab exercises to build skills with the microcontroller and related tools, and longer assignments in which they apply the principles from weekly labs in creative applications. Both individual work and group work is required. Syllabus

Every Bit You Make

H79.2530.1 Call#76839

Mon 12:30pm to 3:00pm

Raffi Krikorian

Popular culture and current events have focused the public's attention on surveillance. In the movie adaptation of "Minority Report", the protagonist attempts to hide himself around Washington, DC while technology tracks his every move. That future, maybe, is not that far off-the city of London itself has half a million cameras installed for use by the security services. How can one remain in control of one's identity in that future? This class creates a framework to help students not only analyse existing technology, but also to them think more deeply about their own projects. We review current technologies such as Internet protocols, cellular networks, and RFID; we also get hands-on experience in both using these technologies and hacking them. We all understand why you shouldn't throw out a credit card receipt with the card's number on it without tearing it up, but should we be concerned with clicking on a link on a web page? Or sending an instant message? Or opening a laptop to sign onto the wirless network at Starbucks? Maybe. Clicking on a web page records your IP address on a web server somewhere, instant messages are usually sent off unencrypted over the network, and opening a laptop usually requires negotiation with a DHCP server that records your computer's unique identifier. Our devices and our online interactions leaves a mark as unique as our fingerprints; thus, relevant questions are: how can we turn those tables? What technologies can we create to trace information left by others? Given that openness is a core feature of the networks and technologies we use-what code, regulations, and etiquette make these useable? Weekly classes and assignments are balanced between background survey reading, technical reading, and hands on experience all culminating in a final project.

Future of the Infrastructure

H79.2297.1 Call#76838

Thur 09:30am to 12:00pm

Art Kleiner

Can the future be foretold? No, but the long-term outcomes of present-day actions can be foreseen -- and, as the 2008 economic crisis showed us, lack of foresight can have grave implications. Using a technique called scenario planning, students consider the present and future ramifications of knotty, large-scale problems related to the evolution of the internet and other aspects of the telecommunications infrastructure. In exploring this, we touch upon the global economy, demographics, international politics, environmental concerns, and other large-scale issues. Scenario planning is a rigorous but highly engaging technique, in which people share information and judgment to create a picture of the future larger than any individual could produce alone. The technique has been used since the mid-1950s decades to distinguish certainties from uncertainties, and to learn to be prepared for multiple eventualities. Students will conduct original research on significant trends, use those trends to develop compelling, plausible stories about possible futures, and present the futures - and the strategies they suggest - to a public audience. As part of the process that we co-develop, the class explores theories about system dynamics, organizational and societal change, the causes of economic failure and success, and the nature of technology.

Materials and Building Strategies

H79.2025.1 Call#71405

Tues 6:30pm to 9:00pm

Peter Menderson

You’ve built a foam prototype. Your project idea is now out in the open sitting on a table where you and your teammates can look at it. It’s not quite what you thought it would be when you made your first rough sketch, there’s even something a little goofy about it, but then there’s also that interesting curve that you hadn’t envisioned. Your teammates have also noticed some things that you hadn’t thought of. You see where you can reshape the foam to make the prototype both look and work better. You’ve made your first step; you’ve moved your project forward. Removing barriers to creative problem solving and learning the steps for advancing a project are the dual purposes of this course. You’re asked to make things over and over during your time at ITP. This class helps you to break out of 2-d screen and keyboard thinking and take advantage of the discoveries that inevitably occur when you're thinking in 3-d by manipulating materials with your hands, observing the results, and refining successive iterations of your idea. From techniques for prototyping and making small objects to fabrication methods for kiosks, you’ll get hands-on experience with a variety of materials and methods. You have an idea for a wearable device? Mock it up with the sewing machine. You're thinking about a squeezable children’s toy with sensors? Make a mold and cast some sensors inside soft rubber. You want to build an installation? Make a foam core model of the space and get a valuable preview of your project installed. During the course you'll be introduced to building in a variety of materials. You’ll make objects of wood, foam, plastic, metal, clay, plaster, rubber, paper and fabric. You’ll move a project from sketch to prototype to presentation and learn to incorporate the lessons of the process into your final product. By taking notice of the unexpected your original concept will evolve, and amplified by those revelations it will surprise you and delight your audience. Syllabus

Mediated Intimacy: Closeness and Distance

H79.2798.1 Call#76844

Mon 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Kio Stark

The experience of intimacy across distances is at least as old as the technology of the letter. Since then, every new technology of connection produces new ways of initiating, enriching and sustaining intimacy. These new developments are often perceived simultaneously as creating distance and bridging distance. Because the invention of technologies of intimacy is a perennial pursuit at ITP, the goal of the class is to enrich students' ability to create meaningful and successful projects related to intimacy. Students gain a studied and nuanced understanding of the idea of intimacy and the physical and emotional experiences associated with it— as well as examining how existing and cutting-edge technologies work to connect intimates across the physical and metaphorical distances they routinely experience in everyday life. The first section of the course is devoted to studying intimacy, bonding, attachment, longing and desire from a variety of perspectives. These will include psychology and psychoanalysis— e.g.: Freud, Erich Fromm, Lacan, Kristeva, John Bowlby on attachment, Jessica Benjamin on bonding, Donald Winnicott on intersubjectivity; recent neuroscience, neurochemistry, and evolutionary biology related to intimacy and bonding; and recent psychological work specifically regarding intimacy and the internet. The second section of the course focuses on current art and technology projects— along with commercial ventures— that explore mediated intimacy across distances (the examples are legion). We scrutinize these projects to understand what they do right and what they do wrong. And we investigate the language and syntax of mediated intimacy, including attempts to incorporate each of (or combinations of) the human senses into devices of connectedness. In seeking to articulate what makes a meaningful mediated experience of intimacy, the course also looks at a group of edge cases— for example, personal performances in public (from web-cam girls to performance art)— that support asymmetrical intimacies. Through this process, we attempt to define a set of possible methods from which to create work. Classwork includes short papers throughout the semester and a final research paper or research-based project proposal.

Site-specific: Augmentation, Affinities, and Frames

H79.2620.1 Call#76840

Tues 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Marina Zurkow

Site suggests contexts that are spatial, temporal, narrative, and populated. Site-specific works require a frame for participants, a set of stories and a point of entry. More than art within "the framework" of an art institution, site-specific, interactive and community-based works require rigorous levels of observation, interrogation, and participation. Whether in the physical or the virtual public, frame and context are primary considerations in the work you produce. This class is part studio and part refection, using contemporary art examples and writings that engage and critique the local and the global, invert locale and involve the everyday as well as traditional urban studies of observation. The studio portion of the class will either utilize an existent space in New York, or work towards the development of proposals for a fictional grant for lower Manhattan. Syllabus

Video Sculpture

H79.2722.1 Call#71475

Mon 6:30pm to 9:00pm

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Video is the new marble. In this class we breathe new life into video as a medium for creating engaging interactive physical sculpture. Video is no longer a flat screen based medium. How do we create video sculptures that move, emote and react to our presence? The course takes video off the screen and into the world of three-dimensional space in the form of site-specific and or physical installations. Through a series of weekly experiments and assignments, students work with projection, tiny LCD screens, physical sensors and interactive software to hack video into interactive sculptures in the tradition of Nam Jun Paik, Tony Oursler and Camille Utterback. Class is divided between lectures, guest speakers and critical discussion/presentation of work. Previous knowledge of video production / editing is not required, but a mad scientist-like lust to bring video to life is highly encouraged.

Visual Communication

H79.2724.1 Call#76859

Mon 6:30pm to 9:00pm

Katherine Dillon

We see information before we read it - and often we see instead of read. Effective technologists and storytellers embrace the importance of visual design and understand the many tools available to convey and manipulate the user experience. These tools include everything from the layout and packaging of the written word to photo editing, information graphics, illustration, typography, animation, color and spatial modeling. This course provides an overview of the tools available and, through a series of practical exercises, enables students to understand the implications of their use. The goal of the course is to provide students with the practical knowledge and critical skills necessary to effectively consider visual design as an important and inevitable component of their work. The goal of the course is to provide students with the practical knowledge and critical skills necessary to effectively consider visual design as an important and inevitable component of their work. This class is especially recommended as an introductory course for people without training in the visual arts who might waive ICM or Physical Computing. Syllabus

rca briefs

RADIO PROJECT


Radio is a strange mix between the physical and the ether; both an interface and content; an object and information.

Radio is... a thing on your kitchen shelf... music... background noise... electronics... services... radiation... networks... broadcasters... communication... culture... shared experiences...

Design a relationship to 'radio’, it could be in the ether or via the internet. It should not merely be about the radio itself, or just interacting with a radio. The radio as a ‘thing’ is simply the means of accessing radio as an experience. As well as practical needs, also think about more complicated and human ones... emotions, behaviours, desires, obsessions.

You could start by thinking a bit about what radio is... the experience it creates, how it mediates between people, whether it entertains, informs or persuades. You might want to consider what it is as a system (What is a live broadcast? Can you listen to two stations at once?); or as content (What can you listen to? What is radio when we can all broadcast?); or its social implications (What is radio in relation to social networks? How does radio create relationships between people, either in the world or in a home?); or as technology (What is internet radio? Why would a radio connect to the web? Is radio just audio?).

The project is also an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with electronics and to begin to explore how you'd like to engage with it as a medium, skill, information, tool and so on.



BMW INTENSE PROJECT -- NOMADS, MINI-NESS AND INFOSPACES


Cars no longer simply travel across geographic and spatial landscapes, they also traverse information landscapes. The tendency though, is to adapt existing objects like phones, TVs, DVD players, and GPS navigation devices for use in the car without really changing the nature of the experience. What if the car itself became an interface, would this suggest new devices, new uses for the car, or even new relationships between people, cars, and environments?

Think of the driver as a nomad using their Mini to navigate, experience and enjoy the information
landscape... what kind of relationship to it would the Mini provide? How would they access it? What tools would they need? How would it differ throughout the day/night and from person to person? How could they do all this in a very ‘Mini’ way?

The purpose of this project is to imagine new scenarios of use for the Mini in relation to information landscapes. And how the specific character of the mini could be reflected in its interactions with an information landscape and any necessary devices and services.


DESIGNER POLITICS


"On 25 April, about 40 members of a Japanese cult called Pana Wave Laboratory took over a 200-meter (600 ft) stretch of mountain road in Gifu prefecture, some 185 miles (300 km) west Tokyo, covering up crash barriers and roadside trees with huge white cloths. After three days, local officials ordered the caravan of 13 white vehicles to move on, but the cultists -- who dress all in white and wear surgical masks as protection against electromagnetic radiation -- refused, explaining that Yuko (Hiroko) Chino, their 69-year old guru, had terminal cancer after communist guerrillas had attacked her with microwaves. "

In this project we will explore the intersection of material culture (stuff, things, physicality) and ideology (ideas, beliefs, values).

What if the Labour and Conservative parties had their own product lines? How would they differ? What would a Conservative toaster be like, a Labour car, a Liberal Democratic mobile phone? This is not about appearance and style, but the values embedded in products and expressed through their functionality.

CLUB MINIHOMPY


This project is a collaboration with the France Telecom team developing a new system which generates an environment allowing people to create tighter social links. These links could be between close friends, relatives, communities of shared interest (such as hobby groups etc.) and people who met both on the Internet and in real life.

The service will contain many elements already familiar to us from existing applications on both desktop machines & mobiles (such as Blogger Flikr, ichat, IM Cyworld etc.). The system is both a web and (critically) mobile-based service and one of your design challenges is to try and take full advantage of both these elements. The system will allow users to design/customise their own ‘spaces’, provide ‘rooms’ that their existing friends can consult and enrich and a network for them to meet new people through. The system will link tightly into the users real life communities and networks.

What the team are keen for this new system to do is ‘strengthen social links’ and to explore ways that people can personalise the space - presenting their own individual quirks, likes and dislikes and blurring the boundary between their on and off-line personas.

Working with the plans for the technical achievements of the new system as a given, your job is to think very specifically about how a real group of users might use or abuse this type of environment.

Each if you will pick an actual Club or Society from the smorgasbord on offer at our neighbouring institution of Imperial College … be it cavers or the conservative club … your mission is to meet these people and persuade them to reveal to you as much information as you can.
We want you to feel as if you know and care about this group, that you understand not just what they do, where they do it and when, but why they do it. What are their motivations? What do they get out of their club? Why on earth did they join? Who are their family and friends? How do they communicate with other people in the club and how do their circles of associates spin out from this group?

Once you have as much information as you can gain about your chosen group you will have to tell us about them – why would we want to join this group?

Only then will you start to design with/for/against them … your design process for this project should be as specific and focussed as you can possibly make it. Focus on your particular club - revel in their specific likes, dislikes, passions and eccentricities and design a way for them to utilise an entirely bespoke system.


NANOTOPIA -- UTOPIA OR DYSPTOPIA?


This project is an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with some of the key issues surrounding
nanoscience and nanotechnology, especially its potential social, cultural and ethical impact on
society.

After some initial familiarisation and research you should identify either a hope or fear for
nanotechnology and develop it into a ‘what if...?’ scenario. Treat it as though it has already happened, and bring back some compelling evidence from your scenario (artefacts from the future) to present in the final crit.

The project has two other important elements: separating fact from fiction in relation to future time
scales; and identifying, making contact with, and consulting experts to help accurately locate your scenario in the near, mid or far future.

ME, ONLY BETTER


From smart pills to designer babies and extended life spans, technology now promises to transform our very nature ...

“We all share a desire for self-improvement. Whether through education, work, parenthood or adhering to religious or ethical codes, each of us seeks to become a ‘better human’ in a variety of ways. And for some people, more consumerist pursuits hold the key to self-improvement: working out in the gym, wearing makeup, buying new clothes, or indulging in a spot of cosmetic surgery.
But now a new set of possibilities is opening up. Advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, computing and nanotechnology mean that we are in the early stages of a period of huge technological potential. Within the next 30 years, it may become commonplace to alter the genetic make-up of our children, to insert artificial implants into our bodies, or to radically extend our life
expectancy.” Paul Miller and James Wilsdon, Demos

This project uses design as a medium to explore the social, cultural and ethical consequences of these developments. Your design proposals should pose questions rather than provide answers, making complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable


MUTATIONS


Media and communication were on a collision course for several years and the fallout has had far-reaching results. Phone companies, Internet providers, and Media conglomerates are converging as the content they deliver and the devices that deliver it are becoming completely interwoven into each other and our technology-driven lives. From a user standpoint though, this has resulted mostly in a culture of the `MULTI` as technologies are simply added on to one another to deliver new types of content to as broad a consumer as possible.
In this project DI and IDE will be working with O2 to rethink the relationship between users, content, devices, and service providers. You will be investigating how these overlapping services, technologies, and objects do not just generate multiple possibilities; they interact with each other and our selves to create mutated ones.

Working in groups of 3 students will research and develop new mutations of communication/media/technology of the near future from the perspective of specific users. The notion of the `user` has changed dramatically and what was once a passive role is now a powerful position which allows people to take an active role in both content production and distribution. Each team must begin by examining a specific group of people to uncover their specific quirks, needs, types of communication, and interactions. From the research you will then develop highly specific services/products/media/devices which address the needs of your group.

In the final stage you will examine broader implications of your group’s specific needs and develop a proposal for how your mutation could affect a broader group of users. Each team will produce a “proof of concept” which explains both their mutation/device through physical prototypes and scenario driven illustrations/films.


54p7


Over the coming years, robots are destined to play a significant role in our daily lives. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge in relation to different levels of robot intelligence and capability? Given a choice, what would we like to happen? How would we like our robots to exist in our homes, public spaces, cities, countryside, and within our bodies?

There are a number of established areas of research: Creating human or animal-like robots (androids); Robots for doing specific tasks that are too dangerous or unpleasant for humans (industrial, military); Invisible robots (in cars, in cities, automating everyday actions and assisting us); Alternative sources of energy like microbial fuel cells (ecobots, gastrobots, etc); Smart products (eg: robot vacuum cleaners); Networked and cellular robots (eg: swarms of
miniaturised robots); And research into the practicalities and metaphysics of artificial intelligence. But one area that has seen little attention is the design of our interactions with them.
In this project, we would like you to explore the idea of the ‘robot’ from an interaction point of view.

Stay away from the clichés. Think about meaning, emotional ties, and aesthetics. You can zoom in and focus on details, or zoom out and think about scenarios, it’s up to you, but whatever you do, your design proposal should explore and question social, psychological, political or aesthetic meanings robots might take on in the near future. Some things to think about: What exactly is a ‘robot’? Are artificial life forms robots? When does an animal become a robot / When does a robot become an animal? When does a machine become a robot / When does a robot become a machine