Abstract
Students enter university art and design schools with ever-increasing technical skills as makers and as consumers. Their interests cross disciplinary boundaries. Although conceptual content can be immature. “Connections” is a multimodal, multimedia, and transdisciplinary collaborative project. It involves three different groups of students working together: students enrolled in an entry level two-dimensional design class, engineering students enrolled in a special topics class, and young people with autism spectrum disorder living within the local community. The media includes a Touch Board™, similar to an Arduino microcontroller, with 12 electrodes that can trigger sounds through its MP3 player, special electric paint that functions both as an electrical conductor when touched, and as a design element, as well traditional and or digital drawing media. The objectives for the two-dimensional design students is to consider the spatial, aural and interactive relationships among form, meaning, and behavior and apply them to a two-dimensional work. The engineering students focus on expanding the scope of the computer code to explore integrating image, touch, sound and kinetics. The ASD students are exposed to alternate possibilities for expression, and to make connections between media and forms of communication. While this research is concerned with integrating human interaction, sound, image, and computer technology in several contexts, it is also concerned with experiential learning, expanding conceptual possibilities, and encouraging transdisciplinary collaborations on a larger scale within art, design, and engineering.
Presenters
Mary Anna La FrattaProfessor, School of Art and Design, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Multimodal Design, Multimedia, Visual Design, Transdisciplinary, Technology, Problem Solving, Pedagogy
