Effective Engagement (Asynchronous Session)
Contextualizing Designed Spaces: Teaching Visual Rhetoric
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melissa Bender, Karma Waltonen
In this paper, we discuss an assignment that introduces university students to the visual rhetoric of designed, public spaces. The students visit a museum or gallery, analyze the ways in which exhibit design influences visitor experience, and write a follow-up report. Offered in the context of writing courses for students specializing in design or fine arts, the assignment aims to help students develop the critical- and design-thinking skills that they will need to succeed in their future careers. As writing studies scholars, we believe that this aim is best achieved through fostering rhetorical awareness in our students. When students make their site visit, this rhetorical framework, combined with their understanding of core design principles, enables them to distinguish between the content and the design of an exhibit, consider how visual rhetoric influences wayfinding and visitor behavior, and analyze the effect delivery media may have on visitor attention. Using examples from our students’ work, we share the assignment’s design, challenges, and effectiveness.
Welding to CRISPR: Design Instruction Tools for Contemporary Art Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Zeigler, Brian Carpenter
Tools are extensions of organisms and therefore are entangled with the development of the human species. Humans began with simple levers and inclined planes, and through the Industrial Revolution, machinery was increasingly aesthetically designed, wherein individual parts were shrouded and access to a visual understanding obscured. To add to this shrouding of parts, recently there has been an implementation of complex coded languages, programs, systems, and invisible infrastructures to order the movements and components of twenty-first-century tools. Consequently, it is difficult for students in art and design studies to engage the tools they encounter in both practical and creative capacities, even though they are positioned as the first end-users of state-of-the-art technologies. Students who are unable to utilize twenty-first-century tools cannot develop reflective appreciation, not only as tool-users, but also for the connection between tool, hand, and mind. This session discusses an approach for cultivating such informed flexibility. Through instruction in courses we designed, Foundations of Art Studio Technology (FAST), and Biodesign, technology is demystified. Students are engaged in a philosophical understanding of tools and tool use, and ultimately we challenge those students to solve real-world problems in interdisciplinary teams utilizing biomaterials and biotechnology in conjunction with traditional art and design tools. Students completing this curriculum possess abilities to understand and use tools not yet encountered. Students engage, master, even subvert, the ways in which tools organize them, and are prepared to employ these skills in the real world for conceptual and interdisciplinary artworks and design.
Precedent, Collage, and Architectural Invention View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrizio Martinelli
“Indeed, I am not able to comprehend how anyone can begin to ‘act’ (let alone to ‘think’) without resorting to precedent. (…) Are not precedent and invention the opposite sides of the same coin?” Colin Rowe wrote this in 1986, in “The Harvard Architecture Review” issue dedicated to “precedents and invention”. It’s clearly a follow up to his interpretation of the “city as a collage”, and to his teaching at Texas School of Architecture, where the “plan game” he played with his colleagues was actually a collage of precedents, represented in plan, and assembled to create a new architectural space (Caragonne, “The Texas Rangers”, 1995). According to this methodology, collage is an instrument of design and teaching. In these contexts, collage can be used, before designing, like a visual sketch, a concept statement, a design manifesto. Evoking, but not representing the actual future, it emphasizes the atmospheres and the concepts of a design proposal. The pieces of the collage acquire new meaning and significance, proposing new scenarios, through new and unexpected combinations. Using collage means also showing the designer’s world, references, cultural and artistic masters and obsessions: collage represents the “spiritual families” the author want to belong to (Focillon, “Life of Forms”, 1934). The study demonstrates how, in the studio environment, collage, interpreted as montage of precedents, is an instrument of invention (as composition of elements already existing); becomes the premise to the act of design, an evocative pre-view (as the act of seeing before) of the desired project.
Learning by Doing: Workshops as a Pedagogical Tool View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sofia Quiroga
Often considered as informal training, the workshop is a fundamental and complementary instrument for the completion of the students' learning process and shortcomings. Therefore it should be used as a compelling and active architectural pedagogy tool. The literature suggests that students from architecture and other design disciplines should learn by doing. The workshops, as an extracurricular activity, characterized by personal learner involvement, represent an excellent opportunity to learn through the experience that requires students' free time and passion for keeping on learning. Workshops allow participants to acquire competencies out of the classroom and some necessary and fundamental capabilities for the practice, regarding materiality, technology, construction process, and collaborative skills. The student becomes an active learner determined by experimenting and working collaboratively.
