createCanvas podcast (2019-2021)

Episode 2 features an in-depth interview with Sara Hendren, an artist, design researcher, and writer who teaches “Design for Disability” at Olin College of Engineering. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt museum. Her writing and design work have been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company and on NPR. Hendren has been a fellow at the New America and Carey Institute for Global Good. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. Her new book is What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.

In this episode, Sara discusses how to shift thinking, and teaching, around disability from assistive design to adaptive design. Her book asks the question: “What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation — rather than a rigid insistence on ‘normalcy’ — look like?” In the classroom, Sara resists the approach of tech-savior-ism and rehab engineering, to instead reframe all technology as adaptive: “take a look at your smartphone, the utensils with which you ate your lunch, the glasses or the contacts that you wear every day, the orthotic shoe on one side that’s helping you with a more comfortable gait — and call that all technology, find yourself in that big plane of existence, which is just an extended body with stuff that has needs.”

The syllabus for the course “Investigating Normal” can be found here.

The syllabus for the course “Critical Designer/Activist Engineer” can be found here.

Both courses are part of the Adaptation and Ability Group, a technical and social lab for creative engineering and design on the subjects of disability, which Sara directs.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication here.

Episode 2 features an in-depth interview with Ari Melenciano, a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, creative technologist, researcher, and educator. In 2017, Ari founded Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism through collaborative research and practice. She currently teaches creative technology and design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU’s Dept. of Digital Photography and Imaging, Pratt Institute’s Communications Design school, and Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program.

In this episode, Ari speaks about her experience teaching everything from AP Computer Science, to kindergarten and middle school, to now at the university undergrad and graduate level. Growing up an artist, she explains her approach to art-making within a context of education and activism, as well as a way to move through life. She discusses Afrotectopia’s origins, and what she’s learned about community building and organizing over the years, as it has expanded to include a festival, fellowship program, summer camp, and, in January 2020, The School of Afrotectopia, a program that offered 10 free courses to over 250 students.

The syllabus from the Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellowship can be found here.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication here.

Kicking off Season 2 is an interview with Lauren Lee McCarthy, an artist, open-source contributor, associate professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, and the creator of p5.js. Lauren is also a member of the Processing Foundation’s Board of Directors. In this episode, Lauren speaks about classroom practices that help to better invite students into spaces where they might not yet see themselves, supporting them with questions like, “How do you make the thing you want to make? What are you trying to say with it? What are the why’s and the who’s of the work that you’re making? And how does it get out there?” Lauren also speaks about the new leadership model of p5.js, and what it means for an open-source project to be sustainable.

Lauren’s Intro to p5 Workshop materials can be found here.

Her online kadenze class, Introduction to Programming for the Visual Arts with p5.js, can be found here.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication here.

In episode 4, Kelly Lougheed talks with Saber Khan about middle-school and high-school computer-science education at all-girls’ schools. Kelly Lougheed is a computer-science teacher in Los Angeles, CA, with experience teaching all levels of secondary CS, from Scratch to AP-level Java. Previously, she worked as a web developer and a Latin teacher. Teaching computer science has been the best of both worlds, as well as the subject of the Master's degree she is currently pursuing. A graduate of an all-girls’ middle and high school, she is particularly interested in girls’ computer-science education and the integration of computer science with art, math, and the humanities.

Kelly’s creative coding curriculum can be accessed on her Medium channel. Here are two beginner-friendly tutorials that use p5.js: Pong Game and Rainbow Paintbrush.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication: here’s part 1 and here’s part 2.

In episode 3, Aankit Patel talks Saber Khan about his previous role as Senior Director of Computer Science Academics at NYC Department of Education. Over the past five years, Aankit has worked as a leader of the Computer Science for All movement at the NYC Department of Education, which aims to bring computer science education to all students in all schools by 2025. Aankit talks about how he and his colleagues have found that creative, physical, and critical computing is an approach that jives with both teachers and students. He discusses the details of how teachers need to feel a sense of a larger community practice with their work, and how to do this.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images, video clips, and links, on our Medium Publication: here’s part 1 and here’s part 2.

In episode 2, Sharon De La Cruz talks with Saber Khan about her work as a multi-disciplinary artist and activist from New York City. Her thought-provoking pieces address a range of issues related to tech, social justice, sexuality, and race. De La Cruz’s work ranges from comics, graffiti, and public-art murals to more recent explorations in interactive sculptures, animation, and coding. In Part 1 of her interview with createCanvas, Sharon talks about joyful resistance and what decolonizing freedom might look like. She discusses her focus on restructuring the dynamics of the classroom, to ensure that POC and other marginalized students don’t have to rely on luck to have access to education. In part 2, Sharon gets into the nitty gritty of what decolonization looks like in the classroom. She discusses how educators with privilege can approach working with marginalized communities, and how folks from those communities themselves are impacted by systemic racism in practice and ideology.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images, video clips, and links, on our Medium Publication: here’s part 1 and here’s part 2.

createCanvas kicks off with an in-depth, two-part interview with Dan Shiffman! Dan is the beloved host of The Coding Train, the vibrant Youtube channel of weekly creative coding tutorials. Dan has been part of the Processing Foundation since before it was a foundation.

In this episode, he talks to Education Community Director Saber Khan about how and why he started making educational materials for creative coding, what open source contribution can look like (spoiler: almost anything!), and he takes us behind the scenes of his YouTube channel, which currently has 889,000 subscribers. In Part 2 of the interview, the discussion continues, covering different sustainability models for open source, the pros and cons of using YouTube as a platform, and how The Coding Train is more about community and documentation than it is about technical expertise.

Read the interview as a transcript, with images, video clips, and links, on our Medium Publication: here’s part 1 and here’s part 2.