Design

The Pacific Northwest is a top region for innovators at the intersection of art and technology. This density of technology creatives – artists, programmers, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs – combined with the Northwest’s uniquely community-oriented zeitgeist has had a meaningful impact
on the local arts community, placing the Northwest in a unique position to show global leadership in emerging genres of interdisciplinary, technology-mediated art. In order to help foster this growing community of artists/technologists in pushing the bounds of what is possible in their work, we organized a workshop bringing together key stakeholders in the region. The workshop was structured as a focus group including a brief questionnaire to generate feedback for how to best support this community.

The spring of 2016 may well be remembered as that mystical moment when the concept of augmented reality crossed over into the collective consumer consciousness through the PokéStops and “Gyms” of Pokémon Go, a location-based game developed by Niantec.

For a select group of college students, that same period brought an unprecedented opportunity to create their own augmented reality experiences when the Microsoft HoloLens team approached the Design Department of the Cornish College of Arts, an accredited arts college located in the Pacific Northwest, with a unique and collaborative opportunity. The HoloLens team offered pre-release exposure to their mixed reality HoloLens technology and the creative opportunity for a select group of innovative student talent to generate unique, mixed reality experiences through design, dance, and theatrical performance. 
This innovative collaboration resulted in the creation of two select groups of creative content – live performances recorded on a 360-degree soundstage and rendered as holographic, volumetric videos, as well as illustrative and animated work created with the use of 2D and 3D renderings produced for viewing through the HoloLens.
Jeff Brice, Chair of Design, and Robin Avni, Assistant Professor User Experience, supervised the mixed reality creative project. Both are full-time Cornish faculty with creative, research, and professional technology experience. The Microsoft team was led by Ben Porter, Director of Business Strategy for HoloLens.

The Pacific Northwest is a top region for innovators at the intersection of art and technology. This density of technology creatives – artists, programmers, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs – combined with the Northwest’s uniquely community-oriented zeitgeist has had a meaningful impact
on the local arts community, placing the Northwest in a unique position to show global leadership in emerging genres of interdisciplinary, technology-mediated art. In order to help foster this growing community of artists/technologists in pushing the bounds of what is possible in their work, we organized a workshop bringing together key stakeholders in the region. The workshop was structured as a focus group including a brief questionnaire to generate feedback for how to best support this community.