Do you have a technology-dependent creative project in your head that you want to build? Do you look at a particular kind of work by other interactive designers/artists and think "I wish I knew how to make that!" In this project, we're dropping you in at the deep end. We want you to propose a creative technology project, and we're going to try to help you build it. Or, more accurately, we're going to help you identify and kludge together a small critical piece of it. The question of scope – figuring out what that "small critical piece" is – is fundamental here, and will underlie many of our discussions as your projects progress.

To "kludge" is to use an ill-assorted collection of parts to make something. It typically has negative connotations, suggesting something that has been quickly and shoddily put together. But kludging can be a valuable part of an iterative, exploratory, creative design process as we move back and forth between thinking and making, concept and prototype. This is especially true when working with (and designing) interactive technologies, where we are concerned with dynamic experiences and behaviors.

Tips for a productive project

• Don't spend time trying to think of a completely novel idea before you start. In this project it's totally OK – we encourage it, even – to be motivated by the desire to replicate interactive and/or technological characteristics you have identified in others' work.
• The project might turn out not the way you envisioned it.
• Although we hope to learn some practical things, we are equally interested in the process of thinking through making.
• Physical computing might be too much of a challenge in this short intro project, unless you already have components or can get them asap.

Simulations are generated by models that mimic alternate conditions. Before the digital era, simulations were mostly associated with non-design fields, such as engineering, epidemiology, astronomy, meteorology, psychology, and economics. These models were typically used to predict or infer performance or events in possible, or future, or otherwise unknowable states.

When software-enabled simulation eventually emerged, it evolved rapidly in non-research domains such as gaming and visual effects for cinema, with echoes in the art world from the very beginning. From there, crossovers continued into architecture and countless media applications. Today, sophisticated simulations are ubiquitous: in VR, AR, games, movies, GUIs (not to mention the simulations of disasters - like pandemics, fires, and hurricanes - we consume daily through the media.)

AR, VR, gaming, and animation all employ tools that could be classified as simulations of one type or another, and in this workshop will be experimenting with these fundamentals using a game engine to apply behaviors and conditions into a digital environment.

Alongside this technical exposure, however, we will consider - in our projects and conversation - the influence of tools for simulation on design and art. Unlike simulation, representation has long been the realm of the designer: illustrating the world for the purposes of communication or as a form of instrumentalized image-making for developing texts, media, objects, and places to be produced.

Is this significant? Is it merely a distinction without a difference?

How can the designer/artist use simulation critically, productively, originally? How does one shift their attention from questions of form to questions of behavior and performance (or are they the same thing)? When using tools developed for specific industries (namely, gaming and visual effects) does one intervene to default qualities of the expected use? Does the capability of creating digital models capable of self-generating and simulating outcomes alter one's perceptions as a maker in general?

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Climatological, social, and technological changes are occurring increasingly at a global, rather than regional, scale. While addressing issues of this complexity has always required the collaboration of multiple forms of scientific expertise, inexpensive super-computation and accessible software allows designers to engage with topics long considered strictly the purview of these scientific researchers and engineers.

For this project, you will create a vivarium: a micro-world where a defined set of properties and behaviors are placed and developed. As a starting point, you will be assigned one of the following verbs, each inspired by a current global crisis, nearing a tipping point: a condition where a controlling system is overwhelmed, sometimes beyond potential return or repair.

• Flooding (rising sea levels) - Zoey Wang
• Melting (dissolving glaciers) - Eric Schubert, Fanxuan Zhu
• Blowing (powerful hurricanes) - Zeyu Wang
• Burning (stronger wildfires) - Mario Santanilla
• Migrating (mass movements of people and wildlife) - Yiran Mao
• Spreading (pandemics, epidemics) - Guowei Lyu
• Colliding (space junk) - Hongming Li, Annie Wang
• Drying (drought) - Miaoqiong
• Accreting (garbage/pollution) - Cha Gao, Qq Yuwen
• Clouding (air/water pollution) - Noah Curtis
• Densifying (urban growth) - Shiyi Chen
• Growing (super blooms) - Alan Amaya, Yue Xi

Communication lies at the core of all media. From speech to the written word, from radio to social networks - the core function of media has been to enable and facilitate communication. In this project we're going to take on this radical approach to communication, and try to get to the root of mediated exchange. We will examine how data is collected, how it is transformed into information, how it can be encoded, transmitted, and decoded. In the process we will encounter the need to build contextualized systems of meaning: systems of representation that maintain internal coherence, but might not make a lot of sense when seen from the outside.

Working with a partner you will construct two electronic beings capable of percieving some aspects of the environment around them. Use whatever sensors are necessary to create their "worldview." Then you will need to connect them into a network that would enable them to communicate their findings, and respond to the communications of their counterpart.

Things to consider in this project: Are both creatures going to be in the same environment or in different ones? Will their "worldviews" (the sensory data they receive) be the same, opposite, or unrelated? Will they be stationary or mobile - and if mobile: self-propelled, or moving with the help of another being. How will their sensory perceptions be processed internally - and is there difference in the way one processes data from the other? How will the result of this process be encoded for transmission? Will the transmission be continuous or intermittent? Will they be able to transmit and receive information at the same time or will they take turns? Is their communication going to be preceptible by the outsiders?

Group assignments:

• Guowei Lyu, Fanxuan Zhu
• Hongming Li, Zhiyan Wang
• Qianyue Yuwen, Zheng Wang
• Shiyi Chen, Miaoqiong
• Alan Amaya, Yue
• Yining Gao, Mario Santanilla
• Zeyu Wang, Eric Schubert
• Yiran Mao, Noah Curtis

If you already have experience making drawings with computers, you know that in that process you draw a circle, then a rectangle, a line, some triangles until you compose the image you want. That process is very similar to writing a letter or a book by hand - it is a set of instructions that do one task after another.

Shaders are also a set of instructions, but the instructions are executed all at once for every single pixel on the screen. That means the code you write has to behave differently depending on the position of the pixel on the screen. Like a type press, your program will work as a function that receives a position and returns a color, and when it's compiled it will run extraordinarily fast.

- The Book of Shaders