Online courses directory (18)

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.

Pure Data is a popular dataflow programming environment for creative applications in audio, visuals and interaction. As an open source visual programming language, it is accessible to beginners, but it also offers a wide array of tools for experienced digital artists.

This course provides an introduction to the core programming skills required to design and build audio applications in Pure Data. Using synthesis, sampling, and signal processing techniques, users will learn to create unique and original devices and systems for music composition and performance. Throughout the course, we will review the fundamental objects available in Pure Data, and how to patch them together to implement standard audio techniques. We will also go over various best practices to help you organize your patches efficiently, and improve your workflow. Finally, we will put it all together in creative projects that will help you integrate what we have learned in your own art making. This introductory course will reveal that Pure Data is an ideal programming environment for creative purposes thanks to its built-in data processing and user interface tools.

What inspires and influences us as artists? This course offers a unique cross-cultural comparative study of creative practice. The class will be conducted in a presentation and discussion format, and is introspective and participatory. Individually, students will share their own art-making and artistic influences across a variety of topics and be asked to examine and articulate what factors shape their values and aesthetics. As part of this, students will also be asked to document aspects of their lives as well as collect examples of art and media.

During this  five week project, students will be given a theme they will develop into a story. This story will form the basis for an original artwork produced during the class, in any medium the student chooses. At the end of the five week period, each story will be presented in the format chosen by the artist. By comparing and analyzing the work, the class will examine differences and similarities of interpretation and expression between cultures.

Architecture Theatre in their many forms have explored narrative design in a spatial context. In this course we will look at what we can learn from these disciplines as they relate to the current state of mixed reality. We will talk to award winning mixed reality creators about how they have had to adjust and evolve to create for mixed reality.

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.

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.

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.

In this course, we will introduce you to the basics of programmable electronics using Arduino. We will start off with simple concepts around designing and creating light sculptures with LEDs that blink to create a variety of patterns and sequences. The course will expand this project to show you how to dim and fade LEDs using a technique called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). This same technique will be used to mix colors of a tri-color LED to re-create any color in the rainbow and produce your very own disco light show!

Throughout this course, we will introduce the basics of programming in Arduino, introducing a handful of useful constructs in C \ C++ programming.

In this course, we’ll explore what it means to work collaboratively in building a more sustainable and equitable society for all people. Students in this course will learn to acknowledge their context, privileges and disadvantages, and the different ways they have of knowing the world. In this course, learning and teaching will be generative, fluid processes. Much of the hard work of this course will be outside the classroom: reading, thinking, organizing and providing situated context for our ideas so our class colleagues can come to a fuller, richer understanding of our own shared and individual experiences. The students and instructor will come together to discover and explore the ideas shaped by the readings, and build emergent systems that provide deeper understanding of our own boundaries and possibilities.

This course focuses on the object itself: What does it do, what does it say? How do objects convey ideas? The shape, volume, surface and color of an object constitute its overall visual aesthetic and can communicate the object’s use, utility, significance and value. Analysis, study, exploration and refinement of 3D form, looking at a variety of methods for producing iterative study models and prototypes. Students will be introduced to relevant theoretical approaches, including semiotics, through readings and group discussions. The goal of this course is to teach students how to control the semantic, formal and aesthetic dimensions of their design work so that it communicate the story of the designer, brand or company to the intended users/consumers.

This course introduces students to twenty-four of the greatest mo(nu)ments in the history of Western art, and the forces that shaped the larger history of Western culture. Two dozen key monuments in different media, including visual arts, music and literature, will provide the focus for an evolving and ever more widely ranging discourse concerning the ways in which we define art. We will examine the way art has been (and can be) interpreted and re-interpreted; the infinitely complex relationships between art and the artist and the viewer; and the time and place in which it is made and the time and place in which it is subsequently seen, assessed, and interpreted.

The course begins with an examination of the fifth century BC Parthenon (1) on the Acropolis at Athens, the greatest example of Greek classical architecture and sculpture, followed by a discussion of the Hellenistic sculpture, Laokoön (2), a discussion that expands the notion of classicism and entails thoughtful consideration of the rapport between art and human suffering.

The Roman Pantheon (3), Emperor Hadrian’s temple to the planetary deities, by many scholars identified as the most perfect building in the world, will be the focus of the second session, leading to an examination of the sixth-century AD mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna (4).

The Early Middle Ages in Europe will focus on the Lindisfarne Gospels (5), while the Sainte Chapelle (6) in Paris will be the conduit for a conversation on the Medieval ecclesiastical interior.

The Renaissance will pit Leonardo’s Last Supper (7) against Titian’s Rape of Europa (8) and Michelangelo’s David (9); Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (10), Caravaggio’s Beheading of Holofernes (11), and Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel (12) will extend that discussion into the Baroque period.

Northern art will be discussed in a session that moves from Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (13) to the etchings of Albrecht Durer (14) and the Bathsheba of Rembrandt (15). The complex of absolutist complexes that is the palace of Versailles (16) will be viewed from the perspective of Goya, as introduced by his Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (17).

Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (17) will be viewed against the backdrop of the ancient regime. Romantic and Realist alternatives to Neoclassicism will be found in the “trialogue” between Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (18), Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (19) and Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (20). Monet’s Impression: Sunrise of 1872 (21) is the opening of a session which ends with a comparison of the Eiffel Tower (22) and the Ferris Wheel in Chicago (23).

The last session will consider a work by Jackson Pollock (24) as representative of the Modern notion of the end of the hegemony of traditional representation.

This course provides a broad overview and substantial introduction to the theories and practices of current object design. Illustrated using recent work from established and emerging designers, this course provides a journey through the "meaning-making" processes that lead to iconic products, and a glimpse into the world of the designers who create them. During the second half of the Twentieth Century, the clearly defined profession of industrial design broadened and fragmented into a defuse array of specialized practices. Rather than confining their activity to shaping objects for everyday use, object designers have expanded their practice by borrowing from fields such as sociology, anthropology, art, film, and management consultancy, thereby uncovering new ways in which design can affect our lives.

Beginning with a tour through design’s pluralism, this course delves into the power relations and semiotic structures which lie behind object making. It analyzes the process of design as it unfolds in the designer’s mind, on paper, through model making, and via other generative “thinking tools”. Examining the motivation of designers today, it reveals radical, avant-garde positions, as well as progressive, ethical, and sustainable practices that question the profession’s quiet complicity in unchecked mass consumption. This course concludes by examining the working contexts of today’s object designers, discussing the often "slippery" nature of client relationships, as well as the joys and perils of independent practice. Making Meaning: Designing Objects offers insight into the way today’s object designers operate, the theories that guide their decision-making, and the tools and processes they use to get results.

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.

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.

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, students are introduced to the practice and principles of hot glass; hand blowing, mold blowing, hot casting, cold working and sculpting. Territories of production, conceptual and discipline inquiry and critique will be introduced and used.

Over the past fifteen years, many of the music industry’s greatest artists have made public valuable information about how they created their iconic sounds. Through the release of memoirs and interviews, their techniques—once considered closely-guarded industry secrets and the keys to their success—are now available to anyone who wants to use them. The information, however, is scattered amongst hundreds of sources. This class strives to gather up that information and assemble it in a way that allows the student to witness the historical evolution of the industry and, even more importantly, make immediate use of each technique as it is presented.