SMS Public Interactives Research Team

Website: smscommons.newschool.edu/pirt

PUBLIC INTERACTIVES is a research-design project led by Dr. Anne Balsamo.  The term Public Interactives names the broad category of mediated experiences that are now on offer in communal and public spaces.

• Public Interactives are technological devices that serve as the stage for digitally mediated conversations with audiences members in communal spaces such as museums, theme parks, tradeshows, outdoor entertainment plazas, and urban streets.

• Public Interactives include works of public art that evoke new experiences and perceptions through experiments with scale, mobility, built space, and modes of human engagement in public spaces;

• Public Interactives are a mode of public communicationdesigned to engage people through the use of digital media in conversations for the purposes of information exchange, education, entertainment, and cultural reproduction.

 

Members of the Public Interactives Research Team include SMS Head of Creative Technologies Dale MacDonald, SMS Associate Professor Diane Mitchell, Sarah Lawrence College faculty member Angela Ferraiolo, and students from SMS and Parsons Design and Technology programs.

The team’s current research design projects include:

• The AIDS Quilt Touch Digital Experience — funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Microsoft Research, and The New School.

www.annebalsamo.net/projects

www.aidsquilttouch.org

• Field Research on Interactivity in the Wild — currently developing a locative experience for New Museum’s Ideas City Festival.

• Online Gallery of Public Interactives.

• Demos of Tangible Interface Applications.

• Workshops on Cultural Analytics.

The team welcomes new members.

For more information please contact research assistant David Wilson at wilsd575[@]newschool.edu.