Programming is often viewed as an arcane art, an esoteric skill that is far removed from design and user experience. With the advent and evolution of higher-level programming languages, however, the power of coding is becoming accesible to an increasingly broad audience of designers, artists, and enthusiasts.

This course explores the use of programming as a tool to sculpt interactive experiences, in the context of Macromedia Flash's Actionscript programming language. Students will begin with a focus on core programming concepts, and will move quickly into using these concepts to prototype personal projects. While the focus of the course is on developing with Actionscript, emphasis will be placed on keeping within the context of designing usable systems and rich user experiences.

Contact
Eric Socolofsky
email: eric at transmote dot com
url: http://transmote.com/classes/itp/desdev/
office hours: 1/2 hour after class, by email, or by appointment

Students

Mikhail Bayder	Susan Nichols Clyde	Catherine L. Colman	Brian P. Fenley
Nathan Thomas Guisinger	Nanna Joanna Halinen	Sol Huh	Ramez G. Karkar
Katerina Melen	Jennifer Rafat	Shoshana E. Roberts	Raymond W. Weitzenberg
Amelia Alpaugh	Rosie Daniel	Jacqueline Rider

Assignments
There is generally one development assignment and a reading assignment for every class. Out-of-class assignments will initially be open-ended extensions of in-class examples, but will become increasingly project-based and longer-term as the course proceeds. Completed assignments will be dissected and analyzed in class. For all development assignments, please post your assignments by 6pm Sunday every week. This will give me enough time to look over your work and address your issues and difficulties in class on Monday.

In the first half, Monday assignments are generally fairly simple, and elaborate on one programming concept. Wednesday assignments are more complex, addressing the topics discussed over the whole week. Reading assignments will be fairly dense.

The second half of the course focuses more on personal projects and is more open-ended. Students will be presenting their project progress on Wednesdays; as such, Monday assignments focus on preparing for these presentations, while Wednesday assignments involve incorporating the week's topics into students' work on their projects. With a shift into production, reading assignments will be more focused, and less frequent.

Course Grading

Assignments (must be posted online)	35%
Class participation	15%
Final project	50%

Links
There are far too many sites and projects that use Flash to list. Below is a sampling of some you may find useful, interesting, inspirational, or all three.

Resources
- Actionscript For FlashMX: The Definitive Guide, on O'Reilly Safari
This is the class text. It is available in paperback, but can also be read online from an NYU computer.

- Foundation Flash 8, by Friends of Ed, is a comprehensive look at the Flash 8 authoring environment. This text is supplemental to the ASDG book, and is optional.

- ultrashock.com is an all-around Flash community, with forums, tutorials, news, job listings, and more.
- Macromedia's DevNet has up-to-date news on Flash, including LiveDocs, a continually-updated reference to Flash and Actionscript.
- actionscript.org is another good Flash community site.
- flashkit.com has a very broad repository of cut-n-paste code. not good for learning, but great for cheating.

Navigation
- Intentionallies is a Japanese architecture firm whose site was designed by Flash superstar Yugo Nakamura (see 'Experimental Sites' below).
- Grant Skinner is a Flash developer who has an interesting and simple navigation scheme.
- global-action.org is an NYC media education non-profit, whose site is driven by a ColdFusion back-end that allows fully-updatable content.
- billyharvey.com is a unique navigation system that implements the rich media capabilities of Flash really nicely.
- 3xn is a Danish architecture firm with a very broad site, with a few different navigations schemes throughout.
- transmote.com. because sometimes you can't resist the urge to plug your own work...

Games
- orisinal.com is a collection of simple, beautifully-rendered games.
- shockwave.com and playfirst.com are commercial game sites, with a ton of flash content.

Experimental Sites
- yugop.com is Yugo Nakamura's showcase of his personal and for-profit works. Great experiments in interactivity.
- levitated.net is Jared Tarbell's playground of generative flash experiments. Some beautiful generative art.
- uncontrol.com is Manny Tan's collection of flash (and processing) experiments. Very lifelike animation.
- Amit Pitaru and James Patterson are two artists who often blend their programming, music, and illustration skills on their collaborative site insertsilence.com.
- vectorpark.com houses a series of creative animations, some interactive, some not, made by Patrick Smith.
- hoogerbrugge.com is a collection of, well, weird sh*t. interactivity ranging from subtle to mild. from the twisted mind of Han Hoogerbrugge.

Previous Classes
- flashback :: spr06
- ccdm-as :: pratt spr06
- desdev :: itp sum05