Design Center: Designing Narratives Across Media

Catalog description

This studio mini will deal with designing at the intersection of three things: developing rich worlds, i.e. experiences and narratives, understanding how different mediums work and what they do, and understanding how genres work in terms of conventions around content and form. Students will thus be exposed to thought from various disciplines like media, genre, literary and cultural theory in order to create rich, interactive worlds as part of a single design studio project. Specifically, we will be analyzing and reflecting on the phenomenon of interactivity by studying how mediums like interactive print, film and cinema, tangible board/tabletop games, and installation art can be employed using the frame of "Other" futurisms (sinofuturism, afrofuturism, indofuturism etc.) that are part of the general practice of speculative and science fiction throughout the world. We will engage with popular and fringe cultural texts and artifacts, so students should be prepared to spend time watching movies, playing games, reading books etc. in an analytic, reflexive manner in order to better understand the different strategies that authors have developed in order to evoke specific responses in their audiences. In this class, you will bring the technical skills required - the object will be to collaborate with others with complementary skill-sets in order to create one lavish, intricate transmedial project that will draw people into the depth of its world. This is not an art class - we will discuss the designerly applications of this type of work, particularly with reference to design studies, speculative/critical design, ontological design, and decolonial design. The object of the course will be to make "other" ways of designing in the world visible and experiment with the boundaries of design as a practice of cultural production.