Term 1: Authoring Critical Media
Faculty: Anne Burdick, Tim Durfee and Ben Hooker
In this course students will create responses to the bi-weekly visiting lecturers of Design Dialogues using a variety of media forms including text, video, images, sound, interaction, etc. An emphasis will be placed on understanding contemporary issues, developing a critical voice, and deploying media to greatest effect.
Term 1: Charrette
Term 1: Design Research
Faculty: Sean Donahue
Design Research is an emerging and greatly contested set of practices. The goals of research (the generation of new knowledge) combined with the skills of the designer (making things) can reorient design practice away from problem-solving and toward design for discovery 150 whether about people, materials, methods, practice, or forms. This class is a 5-week seminar that gives students an introduction to the field: an array of research traditions as well as recent developments in both project-based and human-centered work.
Term 1: People Knowing
Faculty: Sean Donahue, Elizabeth Chin and Ben Hooker
People have been theorized variably as users, audiences, viewers, readers, markets, visitors, etc. This course will expose students to a range of approaches that allow designers to engage creatively with people, as people, to inform and inspire new design.
Term 1: Productive Interaction
Faculty: Phil van Allen
Whether getting things done, biding time, following serendipity, or being entertained, users are readers, viewers, thinkers, and - in well-designed interactions - active participants who build their own experiences and meaning spaces. This is what is meant by Productive Interaction and it requires that interaction designers considers themselves to be co-creators of meaning. Students will learn various approaches to Interaction Desing and explore design strategies for achieving these goals through readings, discussion, design projects and critique.
Term 1: Week X
Term 1: AMP Studio
Faculty: Tim Durfee
amp is an initiative within the Graduate Media Design program that experiments with new modes of research, expression, and application of ideas of contemporary relevance. Each year the amp studio addresses a different topic. Students actively engage in three types of work: research, individual design work, and a collaborative group project. The group project is continued in the summer and completed by the beginning of the Fall term.
Term 1: Computation and Materiality
Faculty: Ben Hooker
This studio class investigates formal aesthetic possibilities arising from the intermingling of the intangible world of electronic data and the tangible, phenomenal world of materials. Materials in this case can be physical, virtual (e.g. on-screen), hybrid, or indeterminable. The aim of the class is to advance our understanding about how fundamental aspects of computation could/do relate to design; to make us more sophisticated, discerning users of existing software tools; to investigate how design projects can stem from material explorations rather than responding to a predefined need or context.
Term 1: Media History/Theory
Faculty: Holly Willis
This seminar creates a context for the professional practice of media design by drawing on a thousand years of media history and criticism. Readings, screenings, and interactions help students to build verbal and visual vocabularies and to create a historical context for their own work. Critical reading, writing, and visual communications skills are stressed.
Term 1: New Ecology of Things
Faculty: Phil van Allen
This studio immerses students in the design implications of The New Ecology of Things, an emerging environment of pervasive networks, embedded and embodied technologies, where every object and space has a life of its own. Students will build working prototypes in the physical world, using sensors, effectors and computation to create objects and spaces that take advantage of this new ecology. In particular, students will work beyond the efficiencies of task-oriented applications, and explore meaning-making systems through productive, mythological and embodied interactions. Students will be challenged to create antidotes to the meaning-sapping uniformity of everyday technological life. Projects will create a more heterogeneous, embodied relationship with digitally enhanced things and activities. Considering the entire context of use - object form and function, physical environment, affordance, interface, gesture, system behavior, haptics, and social factors - students will craft new ecologies that are suited to specific activities rather than generalized to many.
Term 1: Thesis Gateway
Thesis Gateway is a Pass/Fail Zero unit course that Media Design students must pass in the Spring before entering into their final year… their Thesis Year.