A few quick questions with Noa Younse, summer instructor for Code Literacy, An Introduction to Interactive Programming.
Noa Younse is a designer interested in computational techniques for visualizing data and generating algorithmic art. For the past two summers, he’s encouraged students at SVA to develop their coding ability through a variety of introductory classes. This summer he returns to teach Code Literacy, helping designers express themselves programatically.
Tell us something about your summer course we might not expect based on its course description.
Learning to code at any level not only gives you the ability to explore creative expression in a new medium, but also provides the opportunity for an alternative approach to problem solving. Over time this mental shift can actually start to influence the way in which you approach seemingly unrelated tasks. The aim of the course is to provide the foundation for this new perspective.
What will students be making or working on in your class this year?
We will go over some of the basic concepts of object oriented programing and integrate some data gathering and analysis to create a few light data visualizations. Since no prior knowledge of coding is required, we will work on establishing the fundamentals of coding as well as integrating existing snippets into our code.
Got a good book or article recommendation for people interested in the course?
Nathan Yau’s site, flowingdata.com, maintains a great collection of data stories created with various tools. It is a good reminder that there is no limit to how a narrative can take shape.
What are you excited for in NYC this summer (aside from the summer intensive)?
The warm weather – as much fun as this past winter was… it’ll be nice to be able to spend an afternoon outdoors at my local beer garden.
What are you working on these days?
I often have several projects going on simultaneously, most of which have independent themes and clients. The most recent project was a magazine graphic based on data from the NASA archives in which we formulated a quasi-flowing word cloud from popular terms of the era. Currently I am looking at a dataset of pharmaceutical interactions in Africa.
Research Methods is one of five summer intensive courses in interaction design offered to the public by the MFA Interaction Design program at SVA. To learn more about the program, visit the Summer Intensive in Interaction Design
