My Favorite Courses From NYU Tisch’s Interactive Media Arts

I took this class in the spring semester of my sophomore year, and it is a great crash course for learning how to use the machines we have available at the IMA shop and NYU MakerSpace. I learned how to 3d print, laser cut, and CNC, using both additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques. Some of my projects in this class include a Design-It-Yourself Studio with different fabricated furniture pieces to furnish a room and a variation of tic-tac-toe. The skills I learned in the course helped build a foundation of skills that I used throughout my time at NYU.

Playful experiences focused on the physical personal interactions we can create. Within our class, we crafted different interactive experiences and large-scale games with each other. We experimented with experiences like scavenger hunt games and time-based social media challenges. I enjoyed the class because it was a great way to step away from the screen and think about live experiences with people within time and space.

User Experience Design is a practical design class where I created an earthquake preparedness education app from the ideation to the prototyping stage. I learned how to help users have the best user experience through designing intuitive functions and how to use the design tool Figma to make my app prototype. Design is not a skill I had a lot of experience in before IMA, so it was a helpful course for me to strengthen my design skills, and overall improve my comfortability for working within this area.

This class was a seven-week course so only two credits, and it explored the plastic waste in the world around us. We thought about how we can repurpose our waste, specifically how plastic can be used to create new objects and how plastic waste can become a circular process to be reused instead of being thrown away after only one use. I collected plastic waste from my life to melt the plastic bags, bubble wrap, and hooks into a fabric-like material to make my Recyclabag! Getting to make projects using plastic we encounter in our everyday lives in new ways to give purpose to our waste was a fun and eye-opening experience.