https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbTEWB_GrNo - Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eSqVe5d12w - Bubbles

In this studio we will investigate how the city informs the imaginations of its inhabitants and how the inhabitants' imaginations form the city itself.

We will dive into the concept of urbanity through the design of devices that allow the city to be navigated in new ways. Our projects will seek to unveil hidden worlds and experiences within the city that are typically ignored or unseen by urban dwellers.

Students will learn mechanical design and fabrication techniques to develop urban interventions that transforms users' experiential perspective. They will design a device or wearable that allows the user (or users) to explore the city from a new perspective that unveils unseen aspects of the city. 

Questions to Consider:

• What issue or aspect of the city is being unveiled?
• What are the existing traces of this issue in the city? How can your device enhance/alter/exaggerate these traces or add new traces to the urban environment?

Emma and I started out by knowing we wanted to do a project that was on the more artistic side. We thought covering the fishbowl with sticky notes would be a cool idea. In the process of researching we came across a whole world of sticky note art that really caught our attention. We liked that you can't tell what the picture is at first glance, but after stepping back you can see the picture. While brainstorming we also talked a lot about the idea of bullying and how it has personally effected our lives. We thought meshing the sticky note art idea and bullying could result in a really influential art installation. We both really love the idea of "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" and thought this perfectly coinsided with the idea of ending bullying through art. We decided to put an eye, an ear, and lips on each glass wall of nuvu. After measuring the walls and calculating how many sticky notes would be necessary, we turned to photoshop to make our exact design. We picked the pictures we wanted to use and pixelated them to the exact amount of pixels as stickie notes per wall. After this we changed the picture to be just 4 colors. This photoshopped picture became our exact guide for where to put each note on the wall. We were expecting the posting process to be pretty tedious but it did take much longer than we were expecting so we ended up only posting the wall with the eye. This actually turned out to be a benefit because we had morfe time to perfect the wall and add more ideas to the project. We spent a day at our school and collected stories from the studnts about times they had been bullied. People were much more willing to share than we were anticipating and we collected a great amount of stories. We put these on the back side of the notes for 2 reasons; first, we didn't want these stories to distract from the picture of the eye and second, we wanted to take advantage of the fact that the wall is glass and could be seen from 2 sides. While doing research about bullying we found some statistics that were really powerful. Immediatly, we knew we wanted to incorporate these into our project. We used the stories on the back wall to artistically respresent the statistics that really hit home for us.

Overall, we are very proud of our installation and think it depicts the message we wanted it to in an artistic and educational way.

The Music Box is a project worked on in collaboration with the Karam school, located in Reyhanli, Turkey. The town is mainly occupied by Syrian refugees, who are creating a musical playground to give back to the community that welcomed them. The Music Box allows children to play and explore the creation of music. It has been shown that both play and music accelerate brain development in the language and sound processing centers of the brain. For many refugees, who are learning new languages, this could be very helpful. The music box is made up of two cylinders. The inner cylinder holds the comb, which is a series of flat steel pieces that get plucked by the pegs positioned in the outer cylinder when the kids spin it. The kids can ride on the pegs as it spins around. The design takes into account that there will be many different users with a range of ages, by including components that are fun and engaging for everyone, Such as the spinning aspect for the kids and the platform to sit for parents.