Overview
The final project will be the culmination of your work this semester. You will present your designs and your rationale to the class and to guest jurors on:

• At the CIT Multimedia Lab in GSB 2.130
• Presentations and critiques at 6 PM on Friday the 5th of May
• Reception at 7 PM with food and drink
• Please invite guests to attend the reception.

Description
To inspire you, and to encourage you to think creatively and expressively, we will be reading and discussing Exercises in Style, in which a single experience is told from multiple perspectives and voices. Just as Queneau retells a single experience in 99 ways, your task will be to use the medium of DBN to create multiple expressions of a single experience. Specifically, your project will consist of nine DBN programs displayed side-by-side in a 3 X3 grid, all stored in section 17, “Final Project.”

The project is worth 40% of your final grade, so you should plan to spend the same amount of time on this project as you would on a ten-page term paper. Some tools you could use:

• Static, active (animated), reactive drawings
• Modes of reaction (painting with mouse, painting with keyboard, reactive designs, typing messages, networking, timing, etc.)
• Visual language
• Rhythm and pace
• Code as narrative (code which is as pleasurable to read as to run)

You may choose, as in Exercises in Style, to retell a story nine times, from differing perspectives and with different modes of interaction in each. Or you may choose to illuminate one aspect of a single experience at nine points in time. We expect these programs to be your best work yet: carefully crafted code, thoughtful and expressive design, in short, polished jewels. Strive to make your project expressive, and engaging first. Your programs should relate to each other, perhaps through shared code or values, shared visual themes, or complementary interactive qualities. They should be parts of a whole.

Think of your task as that of designing an experience, not of merely writing a program. “What kind of experience do I want to create? What questions do I want to pose or answer? What ideas do I want to convey?” How you code this experience should be secondary to the experience itself. In other words, don‘t attempt to use techniques for the sake of using them. People and ideas, as McCullough says, will always be more interesting than technology.

We would like to talk with you about your ideas for your final project before you begin. You should plan to present a short (2-3 paragraph) explanation of your ideas and goals to the class on April 13th. Plan to vary your approach; we expect to see a full range of static, active and reactive designs. We would like your final project to demonstrate the full range of what you‘ve learned this semester, and we will grade it based on how far youÕve come since January, not on your mastery of the intricacies of DBN. As usual, good ideas are worth more than any quantity of code.