ASU students, Mesa community 'ReMix the Future' for civic impact

More than 200 students, community members, creative practitioners and industry guests from around the U.S., including more than 60 high school students from Mesa, Arizona, converged at the ASU Mesa Center for Creative Technology to collaborate in Tech for Change: ReMix the Future, a four-day civic innovation sprint focused on spatial storytelling for public impact.

Funded by Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) grants, participants designed bold, creative responses to real-world issues shaping Mesa’s future and the world — from sustainable food systems to social determinants of health. Then, using Mesa’s Climate Action Plan as a guide, they prototyped designs across four tracks: startup, game, experience and interactive, supported by expert mentors and state-of-the-art facilities in downtown Mesa, including the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center and The Studios at Mesa City Center.

The event culminated in a Public Expo and Awards Showcase.

The grand prize of $2,000 was awarded to AZwater2030 for their project, "The Cost of Growth," a presentation on water scarcity in the desert. The team included JoAnn Lujan, Mike Amato and Gabriela Mason, and their project was part of the experience design track, wherein participants — or "remixers" — prototyped large-scale immersive experiences for MIX’s four-story Enhanced Immersion Studio using projection, audio and interactive narrative design. They also won the Best in Experience Design prize of $1,000. Other winning teams on each design track also secured $1,000.

Game design remixers created a game level under the mentorship of the Endless Games and Learning Lab using the Endstar game engine, and the winners were team GDF1 (Ethan Becker, Onkar Falle, Clay Mendiola, Gregory Feng and Farayi Machamire) for their project "Farmer’s Market," which explored what life could have been like in Mesa’s early history and the importance of markets and how communities get their food.

Interactive design team Parse (Claire Eo, Minjung Cho, Faye Young and Ben Branch) and their project "What Remains" won the interactive track, where remixers used TouchDesigner and real-time media tools to build interactive audio-visual experiences in the MIX’s virtual production studio, The Volume. "What Remains" is an interactive installation that touches upon the history of Mesa to bring awareness to those who built and stood on the city grounds for generations with the goal of reaching people who struggle to find a way to communicate in a world with an ever-expanding generational and systemic gap.

Parse and GDF1, along with team MPulse, also won $500 community impact awards.

A special startup design track gave Mesa high school students the opportunity to focus on public impact design through spatial technologies. Mountain View High School team Audrey Davis, Evelyn Helseth and Charlotte Whitmer won the $1,000 Best in Startup Design prize for their "ACE for Change" mobile app concept, pitching the use of LIDAR, GIS and machine vision to detect compostability of food.

In addition to the challenges, the event featured public talks, civic briefings and collaboration with ASU partners including the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Enterprise Technology, J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute, Endless Games and Learning Lab, The GAME School, Mesh Labs, College of Global Futures and Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center.

Sponsors and community collaborators included PIT-UN, the event’s gold sponsor, Canon, Lenovo + Intel, Mesa Public Schools, Coca-Cola, MIT Reality Hack, HarvardXR, the Augmented World Expo, Codefy, CONTEXT and the city of Mesa.

“This is what public interest technology looks like in action,” said Stephanie Tomlin, director of industry relations for the Herberger Institute. “The MIX Center was designed to be a catalyst for regional transformation. ReMix brings communities together to visualize and prototype futures we all want to live in.”