Brian Magerko - Making with Meaning

As digital media and computation become more intertwined into our lives, it creates an increasing potential divide in our society between those with technological access and literacy and those who are less empowered. The Digital Media program at Georgia Tech asks how we can, or how we can enable others to, have a voice through the creation of digital media. This talk discusses how we engage in the scholarship of "making with meaning" through digital games & craft, creative computing, educational media, and participatory design research in ways that empower, provoke, or delight people through digital forms. We visit several representative projects from faculty research and student studio work and reflect on the myriad lenses that constitute present and future digital media scholarship.

Biography:

Dr. Magerko is a Professor of Digital Media, Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media, & head of the Expressive Machinery Lab at Georgia Tech. He received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon (1999) and his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (2001, 2006). His research explores how computing can augment the human creative experience. Dr. Magerko has been project lead on over $15 million of federally-funded research; has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles related to computational media, cognition, and learning; has had his work shown at galleries and museums internationally; and co-founded a music-based learning environment for computer science - called EarSketch - that has been used by over 265K learners worldwide. Dr. Magerko and his work have been shown in the New Yorker, USA Today, CNN, Yahoo! Finance, NPR, and other global and regional outlets.