The capstone — an open-theme piece combining three or more techniques from across the semester, shown at the grand show
Due: 21 May 2027 · Weight: 40%
The brief#
Send a piece of matter through the machine and back, your own way, using three or more techniques from the semester.
Open theme, your own proposal from Final Planning & Ideation. The only fixed constraint is the round trip itself: physical matter or signal goes in, something computed happens to it, and something comes back out — as an object, an effect, or a behaviour. Beyond that, whether the digitizing pillar, the programming pillars, or physical computing carry the most weight is your call, and it’s fine for the balance to lean toward whichever half of the toolkit you came into the course already strong in, as long as three techniques are genuinely load-bearing.
A project that quietly assumes more hours than the three studio weeks after Final Planning give you is the most common way a capstone like this goes wrong — the risk you named in that plan is worth re-reading before you commit to final scope.
What you submit#
The piece itself, running, plus whatever a marker needs to run or read it if it isn’t purely physical (code, firmware, or fabrication files). It’s shown live at the final crit; a recording is a fallback for anything that can’t survive being unplugged and moved, not a substitute for showing up working.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline and presentable in your final-crit slot
- combines three or more techniques from the semester's pillars
- the theme is your own, open rather than assigned
- it runs live at the crit, not only in a recording
How it is marked
Judged as a whole against your own plan from Final Planning & Ideation — whether the finished piece stands on its own at the crit without you there to explain it, whether it combines three or more techniques in a way that's load-bearing rather than decorative, and whether its scope matched the time available rather than quietly assuming more.