*If you ask me, this hands-on Maker doctrine sounds even weirder than the supposedly intellectual and abstract "critical design."
*I really enjoy rhetoric like this. I dunno why I'm such a design-teacher groupie, but I could read this stuff all day.
Session Topics
Written by Chris Beorkrem
Monday, 14 December 2009 15:32
Session Topics
Making Real
Moderator: Greg Snyder
Making Real (and exploring the real) will involve questions and practices surrounding the fabrication of physical artifacts as an integral part of design pedagogy. The scope of the papers may range from issues that focus on craft, construction, and technology, to the examination of how the experience of these artifacts conditions the understanding of the lived environment.
Projects, practices and pedagogies ranging from the investigation of architectural constructs to sculpture and installation constructs to food constructs will be considered. ((("food constructs." Does that mean, "we're going to cook some stuff?" Oh HECK no.)))
There is the hope that this paper session will sponsor a discourse on both normative and speculative pedagogies in foundation design studies.
Making Virtual (((uh-oh)))
Moderators: Nick Ault, David Hill
In the past few decades, digital technologies in the design professions have transitioned from a fringe condition of research to one of primary concern and necessity. This trend within practice has been paralleled in architectural education. To this point, however, it has been concentrated in advanced areas of coursework such as (((wait for it:)))) parametric methodologies, generative systems, analytical applications, and digital fabrication. (((Whoopee!)))
While digital media courses are essential components in most architecture curricula, they have not had a consistent impact on the education of the beginning design student. (((There needs to be a word for this phenomenon that dissolves all creative disciplines into mouse-pilots.)))
Digital tools—from modeling software to CNC machinery—have profoundly altered architectural thought and production. This session will examine pedagogical approaches that question the fundamental character of the design process. While the integration of digital tools/media is firmly established within many core curricula, the utilization of these tools for anything more than representation has been slow to develop. Digital methods of representation can transform the design process, but these techniques are generally utilized as a re-presentation of traditional techniques in a new medium. (((Getting all McLuhan here. McLuhan with a fab. Might be something to that.)))
This session seeks to investigate the various methods by which digital tools can effectively alter the formative years of a design student. It will examine how these technologies and techniques are permeating coursework, either as novel exercises within an established curriculum or as adaptations of existing coursework.
Making Writing (((oh lord-a-mercy – you had to wonder when design would make a grab for the throat of literature. I figure it was "experience design," but ya never know.)))
Moderators: Nora Wendl, Ann Sobiech-Munson
In 1988 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari asserted, “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” (A Thousand Plateaus) In this context, writing moves from a subordinate, merely referential practice in relationship to visual and spatial disciplines and becomes itself something made. (((Postmodern invasion! Flee for your lives!)))
Undeniably, writing is a form of making. However, from the vantage point of disciplines in which ‘making’ engages materials more physical than words, our relationship to writing as both practice and product is complicated.
(((Boy, that's for sure. Why don't you click on this link I just wrote, and make yourself some nice steel generative jewelry.)))
http://www.shapeways.com/cocreator/customize?model=50619&material=23
For most disciplines that ‘make,’ writing about the work constitutes a frame rather than an object; this is not so for writers, who engage writing as a craft that generates its own textual objects. (((Oy vey.))) Many designers rigorously maintain a distinction between the practices of making, as associated with the production of objects, images and spaces, and writing, as associated with the framing of these products. As a result, writing is understood as apart from, not a part of, other modes of making.
This session seeks papers that explore the ways in which writing practices expand and inform the disciplines of ‘making’ in beginning design pedagogy. How is writing used instrumentally, as a design tool, to explore and develop design work? How is writing itself a carefully crafted object that, considered alongside other ‘made’ things, enters into dialogue with them? What is the current role of writing in beginning design education, and what realms are yet to come? (((And what happens when I pick up this big coffeetable design book and make it into a coffeetable?)))
Making Drawing (((I bet you thought you would escape, graphics fans)))
Moderators: Thomas Forget, Kristi Dykema
Drawing is a vehicle of thinking. It forces us to question our assumptions and motivates us to discover new avenues of inquiry. This session seeks papers that address any aspect of the interrogative and/or revelatory natures of drawing. The objective of “Making Drawing” is to compile a wide array of pedagogical and creative instincts related to the role of drawing in the design process.
A particular (but by no means exclusive) focus of the session is the relationship between analog and digital modes of communication. The embodied experience of analog drawing creates an intimacy between reality and representation that digital tools cannot replicate or supplant. ((("He's got a pencil! Tackle him!")))
At the same time, it is naïve to believe that beginning design educators can retreat into a purely analog world. How are traditional modes of communication relevant to contemporary architectural education? What are the unique advantages of digital drawing? How can analog and digital techniques complement each other? Or, should beginning design curricula exclude either analog or digital modes of communication altogether? Strong opinions are as welcome as inquisitive speculations. ((("You'll take my artists' pencil when you pull it out of my freshly fabricated robot hand!")))
http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/386-3D-printed-Actuated-Robot-Arm.html
We invite papers that are historical, theoretical, and/or pedagogical. Above all, like the process of drawing itself, we seek to ignite a healthy debate and to further the discourse of beginning design education. How do we define drawing today?
Making Pedagogy... (((I just can't go on! I want to, but...)))
(((No no – even more making, and from the ol' design-school alma mater:)))
http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/ideasinthemaking2010/research/index.html
