Collaboratory

Collaboratories are interdisciplinary, team-based research labs designed to engage students in critical making—activities that bridge critical thinking and digital fabrication. They are polymathic in nature, bringing faculty, experts, artists, designers, and students together at the Ahmanson Lab over an academic year. They are organized around topics, problems or set of questions that are best explored via the hands-on design and production of digital artifacts.

Collaboratories are designed and coordinated by one or more USC faculty in cooperation with Ahmanson Lab staff.

Interested in proposing a collaboratory? Calls for proposals are announced each summer. See our CFP for more details. Let us know if you'd like to receive our next call or email Curtis Fletcher at cfletche@usc.edu to learn more.

Interested in participating in a collaboratory? See our Ahmanson Lab Innovation Scholars program for more details.

Ahmanson Lab: Collaboratory - 2018-2019

Futures of Democracy

Students in the Futures of Democracy collaboratory designed and crafted a game kit intended to facilitate community and individual engagement with present-day issues through acts of playful speculation. The Futures of Democracy kit contains a series of games that allow players to explore democracy-related issues such as campaign finance, corruption, and political compromise.

Terraforming Mars

Mars and its potential habitability have intrigued humanity for centuries. Since 1965, when the Mariner 4 spacecraft found Mars to be a lifeless, barren world, our imagination has taken a new turn--that of terraforming Mars and making it habitable for humans. Students in this collaboratory were guided through a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of terraforming: they reviewed scientific and science fiction literature, built self-contained ecosystems in which plants were grown in simulated Martian soil, attended active learning sessions about Mars, and used fishbowl discussions and worldbuilding tools to visually explore possibilities of a terraformed Mars of their own design. Students also explored the social, political, geological, and environmental impacts of a terraformed Mars.

Mapping and App-ing Los Angeles

This collaboratory addressed the dual issues of a disjointed Los Angeles and a declining local press by working in partnership with the L.A. Times to create a mobile app for delivering immersive journalism. Students in this collaboratory explored ways to tell newsrooms stories using augmented reality, focusing, in particular, on large-scale environmental reports (e.g. stories about floods, hurricanes or fires) that when read, are often hard to visualize.