Matt Parker, Barry Joseph, and Marco Castro Cosio gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Monday, March 27, at 12:15 pm. Their talk was entitled “Teaching Game Design for Museums.”

Museums are places of wonder and curiosity, but are unfortunately often framed as cold and dull. Modern museums are looking to games and playful interfaces to help develop experiences that are exciting and engaging for new audiences. In this panel, Matt Parker, Barry Joseph, and Marco Castro Cosio will discuss their collaborations on “Designing for Museums,” a course where students develop new ways to experience museums and their content through the lens of games.

Matt Parker is Assistant Professor of the Arts at the NYU Game Center, as well as a practicing new media artist and game designer. As an artist, his interest lies in exploring the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. He has designed several award-winning projects, including the games Lucid and Recurse and the light sculpture Lumarca.

Barry Joseph is Associate Director of Digital Learning at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2000, he has developed innovative programs in the areas of youth-produced video games, mobile and augmented learning, virtual worlds, digital fabrication, alternative assessment models, and more, always seeking to combine youth development practices with the development of high profile digital media projects that develop twenty-first century skills and new media literacies. Now, at the Museum, he is helping to guide youth learning programs to leverage digital tools to advance informal science learning.

Marco Castro Cosio graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and has worked as curator of exhibitions and art festivals in New York and Mexico. Previously he was MediaLab Director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the first Visitor Experience Manager at the Queens Museum, where he also conducted workshops on developing interactive experiences for diverse communities. As an artist, his work nourishes urban communities in practical and playful ways, such as his project Bus Roots, which seeks to equip the roofs of urban buses with lush gardens. He contributed to the Rio +20 series proposed by the UN, spoke at the TEDx conference in Cape May, New Jersey, and is a member of the Climate and Urban Systems Association (CUSP). He is currently a Research Fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, based at the Columbia University School of Journalism and is also a resident at the TED conference site.