Educational Advances (Asynchronous Session)
A Digital Game on Creativity as a Workshop View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gurkan Maruf Mihci
In this research I investigate the relationship between creativity and play using an educational game and identify how video games affect our creative process. Recently, I have been developing a one-level game to teach creative strategies and create meaningful images for the foundation students at Herron School of Art and Design. In this game, I emphasize the relationship between creativity and complex problem solving, and try to measure the effects of creative digital games on short term education as a workshop. I also examine how creative digital games help to teach creativity, complex problem solving; and how video games can be part of the creative learning process as a workshop. Digital games are very useful tools to teach creativity strategies to create meaningful visuals. First of all, playing digital games and teaching art/design use the same “learning by doing” learning approach. Second, players face different and various problems in digital games and they try to solve these problems. Third, “gamification” is a very effective ability to manage and foster creative skills. Therefore, I have been working on designing a game to enrich my foundation year courses. You can play the first draft of the game: http://fac.gurkanmihci.com/
Frequencies of Loss: Decentring the Human in Design Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Denton, Sue E. Jowsey
Escalating change in Earth’s ecosphere is a consuming concern for designers. We take the position that as educators, we ought to question design’s anthropocentric leanings to open the conversation to include the unsettling sounds of more-than-human voices. Drawing design into ethical and philosophical discussions, this paper leans into Gilles Deleuze’s description of practice as an activator for recalibrating sensations, providing methods to ponder, critique, and talk about the world creatively. While Timothy Morton’s strange stranger extends discussions about how human and nonhuman agents exist in an entwined – non-hierarchical mesh. Deeply unsettled, we are forced to confront Ivar Puura’s notion of “semiocide” which silences the world beyond Western sign systems.
The Function of Letterpress in Art and Design Education Today: A Conceptual Exploration of Modern and Past Technologies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Howarth
This is an exciting time for designers. The designer encapsulates numerous roles in their problem solving skill sets: graphic artist, content generator, typographer, printer, editor, and publisher. Gutenberg may have started the revolution in the 1400’s, but the form of print is anything but antiquated. With ever-changing technologies and sophisticated materials, the potential for the printed page and its distribution has only expanded. Through this project, including hybrid forms of printing and binding, BFA Students continually use content as the primary consideration as they challenge historical precedents and traditions of design. Artists such as H N Werkman, Alfred Tolmer, the Italian Futurists, David Pearson, Sara DeBondt, Julia Hasting, Irma Boom, and others provide differing models and perspectives on print in its traditional form. Through the use of modern technologies, such as the Kuka Robotic technology - the BFA design students create bespoke Arabic type that will form a new font family, to create responses to their research, this will then be realised through letterpress poster printing. This is the first letterpress machine brought into a higher education organization in the UAE and it will set a president for other institutions in the Arab world. It is part of a collaboration between Zayed University, New York University - Abu Dhabi, and American University Sharjah.
