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 - 2021-2022

California Text + Terrain: Visualizing Ideology and Environment

Students in this Collaboratory will help design an immersive digital experience that illustrates the power of words and ideology on California’s social and environmental future. The digital experience will be on display in Doheny Memorial Library as part of USC Libraries' Visions & Voices event, California Dystopia: Understanding Climate Change and Social Collapse through Science Fiction.

For this project, students will work with Ahmanson Lab staff, creative technologist, Erik Loyer, and Octavia Butler scholars, Lynell George and Ayana Jamieson, and use Loyer’s Text + Terrain Toolkit, a new framework for building poetic visualizations from words. They will help create an immersive 3D setting that turns the subtext of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower into literal text that has the power to shape the natural and built environment.

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The Chinatown History Project

The Chinatown History Project (CHP) is a multi-faceted research and outreach endeavor to uncover the people and places of Los Angeles’ “first Chinatown” prior to its demolition in the late 1930s. The CHP will be working throughout 2021-2022 with potential partners, including the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Metro, to design and build digital projects that commemorate Old Chinatown for the 150th anniversary of the 1871 Chinese massacre.

Through the first term, Collaboratory students conducted historical research regarding the establishment of Los Angeles Chinatown, the people and businesses that arose there from the mid-19th century forward, and the topography and urban layout of this polyglot community. In spring, Collaboratory students began to work with Ahmanson Lab staff to develop an interactive prototype for an augmented reality app called “Old Chinatown.”

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Bunker Hill Refrain

Bunker Hill Refrain provides an opportunity for scholars and the general public to reimagine the history of Los Angeles by telling the stories of a neighborhood erased by urban renewal. Over the course of a year, the research team will use three sources of data created by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s (an architectural model, maps, and census data) to create a digital project that visualizes the material and social environment of the hill before and after redevelopment.

Students in the Bunker Hill Refrain Collaboratory conducted research with primary sources, worked with GIS data, and explored ways to output their findings in various digital formats, including digital mapping, data visualizations, and a short film.

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