Stanford Humanities Lab: 12/31/06 - 1/7/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 12/31/06 - 1/7/07


HumanTech	OPENsourceLab	MetaverseU	Projects	Partners	Board	Contact

The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

SHL believes that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere.

We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation

• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property

• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes

• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

Euclidean Crisis a finalist at IGF

Euclidean Crisis, an innovative real-time strategy game designed by a group of Stanford students with close ties to the How They Got Game project, has been selected as a finalist at the 9th Annual Independent Games Festival, Student Showcase Competition. It was one of ten finalists chosen form more than 100 entries.

The design team for Euclidean Crisis, developed in only ten weeks, is Daniel Salinas, Travis Skare, John Shedletsky, and Douglas Wilson. Doug is a long-time core member of the HTGG team, and John is a veteran of STS145. The group designed the game for their 2006 Senior Project. It has so far won top honors at the 2006 Stanford University Computer Science Department Senior Project Faire, where it was awarded first prizes by Electronic Arts, VM Ware, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and the Electrical Engineering Department.

The team describes the game as follows: "Euclidean Crisis is a multi-player real-time strategy game played using a touchscreen stylus and voice commands. Shapes and colors vie for supremacy in a retro-styled, cyberspace world. Your goal is to destroy your opponent's energy core while protecting your own. Units are controlled by drawing flight paths and command gestures."

It's possible to download the game from the Euclidean Crisis website or watch a promo video if you'd like to see the game in action.