By Leticia Ferreira De Souza

The Public Interactive Research Team has been keeping busy this Fall. We meet every Friday from 2pm to 4pm, at the School of Media Studies loft, to plan workshops, brainstorm about new projects, prepare finished works to festivals and conferences and talk about Public Interactives we have been experiencing. The Public Interactives Independent Study group goes on field trips frequently and report their experiences to the Team, fomenting interesting discussions about what is happening currently in our field.

Some highlights of our semester so far:

• Pcomp dorkShop: On October 3^rd, in a partnership with dorkShop, we met to learn about Arduino and physical computing. We got to understand the basics and the logic of devices like Arduino and are very excited to learn more and explore the possibilities of these technologies.

• Times Square Alliance visit: On October 9^th, we visited the Times Square Alliance, organization responsible for the Midnight Moment at Times Square. We were given a presentation by the Alliance director and had a Q&A session afterwards. We find it interesting to learn that they don’t have any testing model or simulator; the pieces go directly to the boards. Also some pieces have music that can be heard at SoundCloud; they post on their Twitter the link for it. Another point of interest was the flexible relationship between the Alliance and the owners of the billboards: every month the Alliance send an email with some material about next month’s piece and the billboards managers let them know if they want to participate or not; there’s no long term contract.

• Projection Mapping Workshop: On October 23^rd, in partnership with Re/Lab, we offered a Projection Mapping workshop. It was great to learn the basics of Projection Mapping, how to use VPT (a free mapping software) and all the exciting ideas it affords.

• Malcolm McCullough visit: On November 2^nd Malcolm McCullough will be visiting the New School. He and PIRT will be visiting Local Projects, the company responsible for the interactive design of the 9/11 Memorial Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. We are preparing for his visit by reading and discussing his books.

Special thanks to Angela Ferraiolo for arranging the Times Square Alliance visit, and for instructing the projection mapping workshop. Additional thanks to Merrilee Pan who coordinated our Pcomp dorkShop, and to Alejandro Jaramillo who coordinated the projection mapping workshop with Re/Lab.

The semester has been exciting so far, and we still have more two months to go!