One of my jobs at the conference was to teach a workshop, which I titled "Nylon: Materials for Computation." The workshop took place over two days, each day consisting of a four hour session. In the first day, students were introduced to an overview of computational design, hardware design, and programming concepts. They were then introduced to the

Design By Numbers environment and worked on a collection of short exercises to explore the field of computational design.

On the second day, the workshop started with a short drawing exercise to get the students thinking about form and how to translate design ideas into the computational world. They created portraits of a partner using a handful of different drawing methods, which we critiqued as a group. Then the students were introduced to the Nylon programming environment. We translated the concepts they learnedin DBN into the Nylon language, and then they each worked on developing dynamic portraits of themselves using Nylon.

In the end we burned their code onto a HotPants display, that each were able to take home.

Here are some movies I took:

Portraits (.mpg)

Daniel
Karame
Gaby
Ramon

Other (.mpg)

Working hard
Helping each other