I’ll be doing a two hour workshop in Boston on Processing for a conference on graphic design in education. My goal: get a group of educators and students unfamiliar with the tool up to speed as quickly as possible. I’m assembling a “90-minute” Processing code kit for the purpose, indebted to some of the existing examples but adapted to teaching; I’ll be open sourcing that on CDM Labs and certainly welcome input. (Stay tuned — and any of you other Processing folk out there had to do something like this? Ben Fry has a folder of code he uses, I know; Dan Shiffman has gobs of great stuff but it assumes a timeframe more like a semester.)

I’m really excited about the conference itself. There’s unfortunately far too little real focus on how media impacts teaching, and that’s exactly what this event addresses:

Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media conference will gather a diverse group of presenters and attendees from around the world for a provocative conversation on how graphic design education is being affected by dynamic media.

Through keynote presentations, panel discussions, multiple-track speaker sessions, a working lunch, and a breakfast roundtable, we will focus our discussion on five key subject areas: pedagogy; practice; theory; future history; and making it work.

In the lineup: designers of the future, kinetic typography, algorithmic design and open code, motion literacy (which unfortunately I think does NOT mean how many people are subscribed to our RSS, but hey), fluid, dynamic design, and naturally lots on pedagogy.

And I absolutely have to catch up Kyle Buza, who gave us the mmonoplayer Max 8-bit externals.

If you’re a student, you can attend the conference for as little as US$75; for everyone else you can register online for US$225 even without a membership in the AIGA, the sponsoring organization. And if you come, do say hi!

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