Technology of Poetic Objects (ToPo) is a class offered in the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech. The class explores the design and prototyping of poetic objects, that spark a range of emotional and intellectual responses through the means of interaction. Students will engage with hands-on projects and gain advanced knowledge and skills in implementing interactive hardware and software systems.
The key capstone goal for students in the course is public exhibition of projects. Towards that, students will work on projects from all levels of production including problem definition, narrative design, concepting, technical validation, experience prototyping and development. The theme of the class will emphasize state-of-the-art technology and societal impacts they may bring; these include but are not limited to the topics of discrimination, ability and disability, environmental change, and privacy and surveillance.
2021: suspended everyday, objectified politics
Students in the class explored the suspension of normalcy in everyday objects, actions or rituals, through which we interrogate the present reality and our assumptions around it. These designed objects materialize speculative narrative in which the design activity takes place. From scissors, candles, mirrors, boxes, to chatbots, each object describes a slice of fictional reality with some of our problems, biases and tendencies stretched further.Chaeeun Park, Vi Nguyen, Atrayee Sarkar
Yuchuan Yu, Mixuan Li, Huaizhuo Yang
Jinzhi Ye, Xinyue Ren, Zisheng Tong
Austin Peete, Sumher Panjabi, Chae Bin Park
Youyang (Tiger) Hao, Xuanhao Li, Yuwei Li
2020
Jonathan Hatley, Mason Mann, Ollie Hsieh
Yilin Liu, Sienna Sun
Jiaying Wu, Guanhua Sun
Xingyu Li, Kaiyuan Chen, Fangli Song