Tinkering
Media Technology very much advocates a research by doing approach and NMNT is no different (see also About New Media New Technology). Tinkering is an approach to playful learning, focussing more on curiosity and intrinsic motivation, as well as a method for research, literally to re-(and re, and re)search spaces that are yet unknown.
We have written a paper on tinkering more in the context of education but some hints towards research as well, both inside and outside academia. Read through the paper - do you recognize some of these tinkering processes and state of mind?
Maarten H. Lamers Peter van der Putten and Fons J Verbeek. Observations on Tinkering in Scientific Education. In: Cheok A.D., Nijholt A., Romão T. (Eds.) Entertaining the Whole World. Human-Computer Interaction Series. London: Springer-Verlag. 137-145, 2014. Draft manuscript.
Icons in Space
The lecture has reviewed various iconic artists and researchers in 'space'-related work. One of the key artists discussed was Myron Krueger with his groundbreaking work on Responsive Environments. Read the below paper to get more background on his work.
Myron Krueger. Responsive Environments. From AFIPS 46 National Computer Conference Proceedings, pp 423-33.
OpenFrameworks
Create a project of your own using OpenFrameworks. You can take SPACE in its widest sense as a theme, but this is not a must have. Try to be creative by for instance not using standard inputs, outputs or platforms, create something different from the standard OpenFramework out of the box examples, add ons and projects, target a physical rather than pure digital project etc.
We realize that you all have different backgrounds, with different levels of programming experience. Just to reassure you this will be taken into account when evaluating the projects. The use of OF in this assignment is actually more a constraint rather than an objective, so we evaluate the end result itself (is it an interesting project etc) rather than technical (i.e. OF) acumen. Some of the best projects last year were technically actually quite simple. That said, we want to be able to see that, to your ability, you have experimented in depth with OpenFrameworks.
What I do expect is that people tinker - try to go beyond their regular comfort zone, are able to change course when you hit technical boundaries so know your limits when getting stuck, or even turn 'failures' into core pieces of the project (again there were examples of this last year as well).
Your project needs to be documented on your personal page with a motivation, and a visual (video preferred) and other images, videos, blueprints, source code, including references to libraries, sources leveraged etc. So in addition to to describing what you built for this assignment and why you will need to give full documentation of how you did it. If you have worked in a group a single project description will do, but each student will need to refer/link from their student page to the project page (ie just a 1 sentence page with a link).
Depending on background this could take an estimated 3 to 4 days.
Also we will be hosting and openFrameworks walk in session on May 8, 10:00-12:00 (Kaltura Live), where you can come around with your questions or just work for a couple of hours with people around which may be able to help.
Deadline 29th of May