The Future of Participation

Games, Storytelling, & Music

Stanford d.school pop-up course  |  Spring 2014

In this intensive 2.5 day pop-up course at the Stanford d.school, students will gain insights on designing for participatory experience, while working alongside professional mentors to develop projects that will be implemented as part of a live music event at The Tech Museum of Innovation on May 10.

The course will kick off with an evening of sharing from visiting artists and designers who work in the genres of games, interactive storytelling, immersive theater, and participatory art. Next, students and mentors will take part in a curated “game” that playfully structures their project constraints as they dive into a design challenge: re-imagining participation at live music events.

The course will culminate with the public installation, enactment, and engagement of students’ final projects, “design fictions” that may vary in format from games to immersive theatre to interactive art.

Co-taught with:
Armando Kirwin, Filmmaker & Visual Effects
Jeff Watson, USC

THE DECAY OF DIGITAL THINGS

Stanford d.school 4-week pop-up course | Spring 2014

In the biological world, Decay is a physical phenomenon where materials break down into simpler forms of matter and energy. But in the culture of making objects, decay is a multidimensional problem. As a new pattern of wear appears over our world that is data rich, networked, and responsive, we find that the physical decay of objects fail to match their behavioural, cultural, or digital decay.

In this four week workshop, students used the lens of Speculative Design – an approach where the tools, techniques, and output of design are applied in forecasting and hypothesizing about alternative ways of being – to ask “What if” in critical and concrete ways, exploring the role of digital decay as it relates to existing business, technological, and social norms. 

As a culmination of this four-week class, students built a series of prototypes and provocations that were exhibited at a pop up show in San Francisco. The teaching team and mentors from the IDEO Digital Shop worked with students individually and in groups to help build the experiences: developing from idea, to design, to execution. Student work was publicly displayed and archived in the longer term at http://Decay.io

Co-taught with:

Andrew Lovett-Barron, IDEO
Elizabeth Goodman, Confectious