As a graduate student at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, I'm constantly surrounded with astounding creativity from my fellow students, who come from a wide array of disciplines. I'm working among musicians, architects, archeologists, lawyers, designers, physicists, and much more. Our commonality is that we all want to use technology in creative ways.
Twice a year, ITP opens its doors to the public for a gallery-style showing of the best student work from the semester. It's a chance for non-ITP'ers to get a small taste of our flavor of creativity and a feeling for what we're all about. The ITP Spring Show wrapped last week and was a huge success. Before the show opened, I ran around the floor and took photos of a few projects that give a good idea of what the program is about.
I'm sure a rocking chair is not what you'd expect to see from a technology program. But Chairish, Annelie Berner's rocking chair for two is the work product for a class called Design for Digital Fabrication. Using CAD software, Annelie went through many design and prototyping iterations. Eventually, she cut the design out of plywood with a computer-controlled (CNC) router. The pieces are held together with threaded rod and nuts to make a chair for sharing.
Hanging from the ceiling was an interactive piece called "Swings" by Claire Mitchell, Engin Ayaz, and Patrick Muth. The person swinging wears a set of headphones and hears audio tracks which are layered according to the swinging patterns of the user. I asked Patrick how show-goers reacted to such a fun installation: "We were attracted to working with a swing because of its potential to be both an exhilarating and calming experience and the feedback we received suggested we created one. The users I spoke to really appreciated that every design choice we made (the site-specific sounds, creating the seat with wood from a sewing machine crate, minimizing the visible technology by using an iPhone as a sensor) was done with the concept in mind and that it really enhanced the experience."
Philip Groman and Robbie Tilton were showing off Rehuddle, a dead-simple conference calling site that reminds me a lot of Turntable.fm. It was created for a class called "Re-dial" which uses Asterisk to "explore the use of the telephone in interactive art, performance, social networking, and multimedia applications."
Based on a Korean cultural ritual for memorializing the dead, Bona Kim and Hanna Kang-Brown created Jesa. As the user moves the vessels of food onto the large table, RFID sensors trigger videos related to the deceased to appear on the screen.