Lots of nice work at the ITP winter show this year.
I still think a little more curation to prune the “hello world” projects wouldn’t hurt, but such is ITP.
Here are some personal favorites:
Written World
Zach Schwartz, Martín Bravo, Nara Kasbergen, Rachel Slaff, and Ruth Spencer
Brilliant mashup of Google Maps and the not-as-famous-as-it-should-be Your World of Text. Written world lets you leave persistent messages on a map in real time. I really think it needs an address search bar to make it easier to explore other parts of the world — and being able to zoom out and see the density of conversation around the globe would be amazing. Regardless, it’s a great idea and the execution is polished. Go try it!
Fade Away
Matt Richardson
A servo-mounted laser methodically draws text (tweets) on a phosphorescent screen. The glow-in-the-dark screen holds a record of the laser’s path. So nice to get away from flickering screens (even if we can’t get away from tweets).
Cavendish Trebuchet
Lia Martinez, William Jennings A tiny catapult as an interface for cueing projected clips of bananas hitting a wall. Simple, but instantly gratifying.
Contextual Interface for Remote Gestural Input
Gavin Hackeling, Zena Koo
Wonderful side-stepping of QR-driven AR by using real images as tags in lieu of robot barf. Watch the video.
SoZen
Luis Palacios, Kaitlin Till-Landry, and Peter Darche
An XY table that draws in a pseudo-zen garden sand pit. Instead of putting a pen or pencil on the business end of an XY table, SoZen’s creators use a strong magnet to drag a ferrous ball through the sand to build up a drawing. Making an XY table is a PComp rite of passage, but this is a great take on it and a nice use of magnetic indirection to keep the mechanism out of sight and mind.
Solid
Ivana Basic A plaster sculpture slowly destroys itself from the inside out in the absence of attention. More art should behave like a suburban adolescent.
Archived Visualizations
Kate Watson
Finally, someone braves the ITP thesis archives. It’s the only real hope for deconstructing what, exactly, ITP is / was, while removing all excuses for creating the same projects over and over. Looking forward to seeing the evolution of Archived Visualizations next semester.