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 - 2019-2020

Distan Destinations rendering of people shopping

Distant Destinations

Students in this Collaboratory worked with Kenneth E. Phillips from USC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and Curator for Aerospace Science at the California Science Center as well as the Center’s Curation and Exhibit Development Team to research and design an interactive, multiplayer museum exhibit on the challenges of human-piloted deep space missions.

screenshot of interactive virtual environment that allows viewers to explore the Stanza della Segnatura

Building a Virtual Renaissance Library: Julius II’s Stanza della Segnatura

Students in this Collaboratory reconstructed a digital version of the “Julian Library.” In doing so, they analyzed Renaissance books in USC Libraries' Special Collections; researched the paintings, the collected manuscripts and their authors; and considered Renaissance linear perspective in connection to today’s digital constructs.