COLABlog

Join COLAB for the Final Juice Night at Inn Complete Friday, April 17 from 11pm-2am. Food and music from the DJ.

If you want to be part of a team to come up with ideas on how to energize and celebrate the bridges in downtown Syracuse come to the info session this coming Monday, April 6, at 7 pm in Watson Auditorium open to all SU and ESF students.

Sponsored by COLAB.

Come to The Inn Complete every Friday for “JUICE”, a COLAB sponsored event from 9pm-close featuring free bar food, drink specials, and music from the DJ.

YES - The article in the New York Times went to print!  Congratulations to Lily Chong and Matt Kalish who’s project “Stampede” was published in the New York Times. This project was completed in the first COLAB class “Wearable Technologies”. Matt and Lily designed, built and programmed stuffed animal with brains. These subversive little cuddlies were designed to interrupt meetings if issues are not being addressed. Squeezing any one animal for two seconds sends a radio signal to all the animals and they all light their LED eyes at once causing a stir and interrupting the meeting. Nice idea and terrific execution.
Wearable Technologies was taught collaboratively between the Art dept. and the Design dept. by professors Olivia Robinson and Michael McAllister along with graduate assistants Steve Belavorich and Hye Rin Yang.

Click here to read the New York Times article online.

Under pressure from their professors Lily and Matt have also entered “Stampede” into the ID Annual Design competition. Fingers crossed… We’ll post again if they fare well there.

On Thursday, November 20th, COLAB celebrated its successful launch with its Grand Opening party at COLAB’s home space at the SU Warehouse. The multifunctional, multi-faceted space that serves as classroom, laboratory, work site and gathering place by day, was dressed up for the occasion with artful décor, fun installations and music, good food from local establishments, and a variety of impressive exhibitions of student/COLAB work. The work produced during the interdisciplinary charrette, conducted the weekend before with the Chamber of Commerce, was on display, and the winners of the competition were announced during the opening. Dynamic student work from COLAB classes in furniture and “wearable technologies” were on show as well, as was a sample unit of the light sculptures soon to be placed along Genesee Street as a result of an interdisciplinary student proposal from a charrette last spring. For the several hundred guests from across the community who attended, the atmosphere of creative energy, possibility and fun made for an enjoyable experience and served well to communicate the spirit as well as the substance of COLAB.

This semester COLAB sponsored an interdisciplinary class called “Wearable Technologies”. We had sixteen students from 5 different majors including Fashion Design, Industrial and Interaction Design, Fiber Arts/ Material Studies, Photography, and Computer Arts. Through hands-on projects we intersected electronics, programming, and the body. The electronics mostly centered on using the Lilypad microcontroller and various sensors. The amazing part is that art and design students were able to tap these open source technologies to express their concepts through working prototypes. We saw quite a range of prototypes from socks that light up at night; body driven interfaces for computer games; several reactive jackets for signaling attraction, aversion, or for exaggerating gestures; a knit hat that whispers advice from grandma; quite a few interactive art experiences; stuffed animals with intelligence; furniture that remembers your presence; inflatable dresses; and several polemic projects posing questions of technology and medicine; and many other interesting works… The students showed their final projects at the Grand Opening of COLAB to very interested crowds of people.

The class finished last week with a talk and critique by brilliant guest artist Di Mainstone. Di studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London and is here in the states for a few months having just completed a residency at V2 Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. Following presentations and critique of each student’s final project, Di gave a digital presentation of her projects and design methods. Her work includes experimental fashion collaborations with engineers, dancers, and architects and relies on constant and fearless experimentation. The last project she showed included interlocking dresses that trigger pools of light when connected. She gave all of us a lot of inspiration and we hope to have her back in the future.

One of the student projects, “The Enchantress,” by Tim Westbrook included a dress designed to inflate when the wearer blows across her hand. The Post Standard printed a photo of Tim’s project in the paper on Nov 21. Very nice. And we believe that the New York Times will soon publish an article on a project by the student team of Matt Kalish and Lily Chong. For their project, “Stampede”, they hand sewed soft stuffed elephants that secretly have micro-controllers for brains. These cuddly little subversive animals are to be handed out in large group meetings and are programmed to light the eyes of all the other elephants in the room if just one of them is squeezed for 2 seconds, creating an interruption in the meeting. Lily and Matt put a lot of effort into resolving their concept into beautiful working prototypes.

Located on first floor of The Warehouse, Syracuse University