TELEPATHIC CONSTRUCTION: Teaching Empathic Design and Fabrication across Remote Distances

Abstract

Telepathic Construction is a remote distance learning environment for engaging students from City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media with state-of-the-art design and fabrication education from the world-renowned Parsons School of Design through an intimate online empathetic collaboration format with telepresence robotic arm. Telepathic Construction will be manifest as course SM3808 in Art and Science Studio at SCM and cross-listed with the Parsons Design and Technology curriculum, involving both Hong Kong and New York students in collaborative crafting for bodily spaces. The goal of this course is to subvert norms that govern bodies and imagine radical remote presence strategies that extend our bodies across time, space and culture using human-machine interaction. Run in collaboration with Parsons School of Design, students will collaborate in teams across the Pacific to research and investigate strategies for empathetic interaction, alternate sensory input/output pairings and conceptions of mutable time and space. In the process, students will engage in personal and collective meaning-making to enable them to better understand different customs and diversity of attitudes about the self.