Enriching Foundations
How Title Sequence Designs in Fantastic Turkish Cinema Reflect Cultural, Social, and Economic Transformation between 1950-80 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gurkan Maruf Mihci
By researching Turkish fantastic films and their title sequence designs, my aim is to showcase how aspects of national and cultural diversity must be accounted for in undertaking a study of design and visual culture that moves beyond Western and Euro-centric models. My project demonstrates that in order to research Turkish cinema history, one must take into account various historical, political, and cultural influences that impacted the transformation of Turkey as a society as a whole. Title sequences – with edited excerpts, colors, typography, composition, sound and music that provide compact references to the film itself – started to be used in Turkish films after the 1950s. Between 1950-1980, hundreds of fantastic movies were produced in Turkey, based on historical myths, or western superheroes. Especially in concert with fantastic and historical action Turkish movies in the late 60s, when the films became hugely popular, title sequences were actively developed in parallel with the subjects of the films. In this research, title sequences of Turkish films between 1970- 1980 are discussed in terms of time, narrative, and design; specifically, my analysis will explain how these concepts are blended. Some of the title sequences focus on animations or moving images; other title sequences are based on the introductory scenes of the films. By employing the analog technology available to them, the designers and filmmakers used different overlapping techniques to write titles on the images. My research also explores the relationship between film narration and the title sequence design decisions.
Let's Make Future?: New Design and Production Paradigms and How to Practice Them in Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fabrizio Valpreda
Crafting finds powerful roots where new makers professions, hybridized or even derived from traditional design, merge and contrast with the classic designer, not always finding a clear professional position and sometimes lacking a clear previous training profile. Such design and production scenario requires urgent structural intervention to organize its evolution through the education of new competences in the ways of interacting with the territory, among themselves and confronting each other in a metadisciplinary way with the tools provided by the technological innovation. One of the most relevant environments where the aforementioned interventions should be set up are the schools, in particular, but not only, universities. Education should prepare new designers not only to be ready in the design field but also to be able to manage their knowledge and work within makerspaces and fablabs; those are still evolving, not necessarily looking for a stable condition, for dynamic ones. To make this asset clearer, the research analyzed different case studies (Fablab Torino - ITA; Noisebridge - San Francisco, US; The Shop.Build - San Francisco, US; Circuit Launch - Oakland, US; Digital Fabrication Lab - UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design - Berkeley, US; virtuaLAB and modLAB - Politecnico di Torino, ITA; Iceland fablabs organization) in the makerspace and educational environment, in order to understand the relation between them and between people involved in their activities. The practice of making design education will be presented with tangible case studies developed in Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with FabLab Torino.
Universal Design in Education: Assertion of Societal Commitment through University Projects
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Valerii Belgorodskii, Ekaterina Gurova
Responsibility to the society does not appear out of thin air; the acquisition of this feeling is a labour-intensive process. That is the reason why we study various aspects of socially oriented design at our Institute. The purpose of this approach is to generate the sense of responsibility in students and in others via their artistic efforts. However, creativity alone is not enough to make the difference. In our paper we scrutinize other factors influencing this highly complicated process as exemplified by two socially oriented projects carried out by our students. The first one still continues at the Moscow Bakulev Hospital and involves volunteer graphics classes to help rehabilitate pediatric cardiac patients. This charitable project includes designing prints for sweatshirts that turned out to be highly sought by the industry and marketing. The second one is also a socially significant case represented by our students who developed artwork and final design for a Moscow Ring Subway Train to promote 2019 Winter Sports Universiade that took place in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Later many of these images were chosen to become the official symbols of the Universiade, while some of the students got personal grants from the Organizing Committee.
Visual Aesthetic Dilemma: Investigating the Differences Between Designer vs. non-Designer Evaluation of Product Aesthetics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jieun Kwon, Ehsan Naderi
Centrality of Visual Product Aesthetics (CVPA) is a measurement that conveys the degree to which an individual considers visual aesthetics when evaluating a product. Previous studies on CVPA failed to show how CVPA levels affect the individual evaluation of product aesthetics. Accordingly, two studies were designed to examine a) if individuals with design background have higher CVPA than those that do not, and b) the differences between low CVPA vs. high CVPA individuals in their evaluation of visual product aesthetics. In the first study, a t-test revealed that individuals with design background have higher CVPA than those without (p<0.05). In the second study, a simple comparison showed that high-CVPA individuals consider “balance and symmetry” as the most important factor in visual product aesthetics, low-CVPA group rated “familiarity” as the most important aesthetic factor. The findings imply that designers and consumers may have discrepancy in understanding product visual aesthetics.
