Online courses directory (19947)

This 4-session survey course covers the main designers in Parisian Fashion from the 1990s to today, focusing closely on one iconic creative individual for each decade. Their work is discussed in light of the cultural and political context of the time, which students learn about through video lectures, assigned readings and discussions. In addition to learning about specific designers and key sartorial techniques and trends, students learn about the main phenomena in the fashion business for each decade. Students are shown how the past influences and shapes the present.

The first session focuses on the 1990s, globalization, and the designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake. The second session highlights four top Anglophone designers: Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. The third session summarizes the main changes in business models and the arrival of large luxury conglomerates at the beginning of the century. It also features Christian Louboutin as a designer. The final session is devoted to students’ final presentations and projections about the next developments in technology, business models and media.

In addition to weekly quizzes on designers and techniques, students are required to complete readings and participate in weekly online discussions and the course culminates with a personal research project in which students use primary sources to research the influence of French fashion on a contemporary designer of their own choosing.

The media of mixed reality allows for increasingly immersive experiences that blend the virtual and real, and that change how we perceive and think about what is real. This course attempts to place the evolution of mixed reality in the long history of humans hacking perceptions of reality: from pyramids to cathedrals to google earth VR, from cave paintings to novels to film to immersive cinema.

This course will introduce you to the different forms mixed reality takes. We will:

• Learn about the different hardware platforms mixed reality spans, and understand their differences.
• Practice creating by taking a short story from Italo Calvino and seeing how it translates into Mixed Reality.
• Understand the context of mixed reality as it relates to philosophy and psychology.
• Critically review currently available mixed reality experiences to be inspired and understand best practices.

This course presents five sessions in which the student is introduced to playing the piano and reading music. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training and a video assessment of the student playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for two concert reviews, which can be completed at any time during the course, and a final exam in which the student will improvise a piece. This course presents five sessions in which the student is introduced to the fundamentals of piano playing and music reading. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments, and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video submitted by the student of playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for a concert review and report, which can be completed at any time during the course.

Creating for Mixed Reality involves a variety of disciplines and tools that need to be brought together into a single pipeline. Rarely does one person contain the experience to do everything to satisfaction, it takes a village. In this course we will discuss the wide array of disciplines (architecture, vfx, animation, game design, interaction design, character design) and look at different approaches to creating content including shortcuts to achieve a more lifelike experience with less effort.

In this course, we will explore adding features and functionality to our Arduino. We will expand upon the foundations taught in Foundations in Arduino Programming and show you how to make sounds, display information, and interface special addressable RGB LEDs.

After you've mastered the basics of input and output on the Arduino, the next step is learning how to get the Arduino to make sounds and play notes. We will then expand this project to show you how to play your favorite ringtones or small music files right on your Arduino! Finally, the course will conclude with an activity around interfacing and programming for a strip of WS2812 Addressable LEDs.

This course is offered in collaboration with SparkFun Electronics.

In this course, we will introduce you to the basics of motion control and robotics. We will show you how to build a few simple circuits to connect motors and add motion control to your next project. We will start by covering the basics behind servo motors, and make our way toward adding larger motors to your projects, and using switching transistor circuits to drive them. Learning to control motors is a basic step to home automation and robotics projects. Finally, this course will teach you about H-Bridge circuits and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) Control Systems for extended control over speed, direction, and motion.

This course is offered in collaboration with SparkFun Electronics.

This course extends the course material from the first course on Creative Applications of Deep Learning, providing an updated landscape on the state of the art techniques in recurrent neural networks. We'll see how to use recurrent networks for modeling and generating images, text, handwriting, and attention. We begin by recapping what we've done up until now and show how to extend our practice to the cloud where we can make use of much better hardware including state-of-the- art GPU clusters. We'll also see how the models we train can be deployed for production environments. The techniques learned here will give us a much stronger basis for developing even more advanced algorithms in the final course of the program.

This course presents five sessions in which the student continues to learn piano technique and repertoire through use of the C and G Major scales and primary chords. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video assessment of the student playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for two concert reviews, which can be completed at any time during the course. After the completing the five sessions, the student will complete a final exam by performing a memorized piece of music and a piece learned by ear (Instructor’s Choice) for an audience. The memorized piece will be the student’s choice from Sessions 4 or 5 in this course, and must be digitally recorded and uploaded as an additional video assessment. This course presents five sessions in which the student continues to learn piano technique and repertoire through use of primary chords and scales in C and G Major. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments, and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video submitted by the student of playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for a concert review and report, which can be completed at any time during the course. After the competing the five sessions, the student will complete a final exam by performing a memorized piece of music for an audience. This piece will be the student’s choice from Sessions 4 or 5 in this course and must be digitally recorded and uploaded to YouTube with a link provided in the course website.

Custom Handlettering covers unique and beautiful handlettering used across a wide spectrum of design disciplines. The practice involves drawing letterforms already composed into words, rather than creating characters for an entire alphabet and combining them. Generated for specific uses rather than assembled from a kit of parts, handlettering provides infinite variety for type designers. Students will explore ways to build out an entire digital typeface from handlettered characters.

Tools, methods, and techniques for creating expressive lettering using traditional tools and media such as ink, pen, paint, and brush will be demonstrated. Digitizing hand drawn type into vector fonts, and combining handwork with digital design within projects will be explored. Creating consistent lettering systems by hand and exploring handlettering from illuminated manuscripts through graffiti are also covered.

Making Typeface Families includes drawing a complete alphabet start to finish, then building on to add bold, italics, small caps, glyphs, and other Open Type features including language support. Topics will include researching and sourcing references, translating concepts from rough pencil sketches to digitized finishes, and establishing cohesiveness in a small trial range of selected characters. Versions and variations on each letter will be explored in a detailed study of each component, and students will establish how these parts need to come together in a logical way to form a set of related letters and eventually, an entire typeface.

Typography in Graphic Design covers the role of typefaces as cultural artifacts and how the influences and concerns of the day are reflected in type vernaculars. Very fine detail on font characteristics will also be explored (stroke widths, x-heights, serif qualities, etc.) and how these affect usage and emotional impact. Choosing the right typeface for a project and mixing typefaces in a design will be explained in depth.

Selling and Protecting Typefaces addresses the many concerns of developing and marketing typefaces for the professional environment. The course also discusses the different roles of a type foundry, an aggregator, and the individual designer who wishes to license and sell a typeface.

The course covers all the issues involved in selecting and licensing typefaces for commercial use in all sectors of the design industry: e-commerce, direct sales, social media, traditional advertising, intellectual property, licensing models, and pricing. It includes start to finish instruction in creating design briefs for custom-type projects for clients of all sizes and budget levels. Fee scales for custom type design will be discussed in depth. Participants will be familiarized with professional industry standards for high-quality digital typefaces in contemporary markets, including language support, font file formats and technical concerns.

Software engineering and asset production are the means of digital game development, but the end is an intentional experience. Digital game design is the process of creating, implementing and iteratively refining that experience.

This hands-on course will introduce you to the theory (lehr) and practice (kunst) of digital game design. You will modify, design, build and test a number of toys and games using the Perlenspiel gameclavier, a cloud-based, abstract microgame engine programmed in JavaScript. Lectures and readings will familiarize you with key principles and vocabulary of general design, together with issues and methods specific to the development of digital games.

Nearly all devices now used to play digital games are connected to a network. This fact has revolutionized the game development process. Telemetric instrumentation can silently measure and transmit data on the behavior and performance of games and their players. Statistical analysis of the resulting databases can be a powerful tool for refining and verifying the attainment of design criteria.

This course provides experience in devising measurable experience goals, together with the basic techniques and mathematics needed to capture and analyze player behavior. It concludes with a reflection on the ethical implications of data-driven design, and the role of game designers as creators of cultural artifacts imbued with meaning and the potential for influence.

Introduction to rules-based drawing with software (Rhino3D and Adobe Illustrator) focusing on graphic compositions of points, lines, and curves. Exercises will introduce and utilize basic ordering systems, two-dimensional geometric operations, graphic compositional principles, and visual hierarchy and legibility with line weights, tone, and poché. Tangible outcomes from the assignments will include line and tone drawings, modulated field drawings, and graphic collage compositions.

Based on the concepts and algorithms explored in the previous 2 courses, "Extracting Information from Music Signal" and "Music Data Mining", we show how more complete and complex music retrieval systems, tasks, and algorithms can be developed. More specifically we will look at how four complete music retrieval systems are put together: audio fingerprinting, query-by-humming, chord-detection, polyphonic music-score alignment, and a visual music browser based on self-organizing maps.

This course focuses on the design of modules or components that can be assembled/clustered/aggregated to form a larger spatial component system to enhance an existing space. Rather than aggregating identical components (such as bricks which are identical in size and shape), we will be designing our own components that can vary in size and shape to form differentiated component systems. The exercises in this course will introduce and develop parametric thinking skills (without the use of advanced parametric design software) and will require the student to fabricate working prototypes of her/his component system out of simple materials or commonly found items.

This course introduces three-dimensional composition of modules, basic form and volume principles, and form-based (three-dimensional) operational and ordering strategies. We will focus on the relationships between form and space with basic ingredients such as planes, surfaces, masses, and volumes. Students will produce physical and digital working models of their module studies as well as generating plan and section drawing types.

Gamecrafting is a second-order design problem. Unlike traditional linear media, in which the form and sequence of an experience are created by the designers, game experiences are created by the players. Good game designers must be therefore be good anticipators, striving to imagine and optimize the range of interesting choices afforded by their designs. They must also anticipate the range of experiences they can afford to afford, based on the practical limits of available time and resources.

This course focuses on the basic skills of scoping a game project to keep it manageable, iterating on design details to refine and improve the player experience, and thoroughly testing game prototypes (using both automation and live subjects) to determine if experience goals are being achieved.

This course introduces the student to the history and techniques of creating objects from hot metals. Techniques include the 3000 year old lost-wax (cire-perdue) method, sand casting methods dating back over 5000 years, and others. Finishing techniques covered include drag and flash removal, surface cleaning and polishing, and others.