IDES 322: Techniques Studio

"Creativity is as important as literacy." - Sir Ken Robinson Today marks the first day of a new project that all of us are very excited about. The five of us will be collaboratively teaching a course - IDES 322: Techniques Studio - in the Industrial Design department at The University of the Arts. This is a class where students learn the basics of creating a website and putting their work online. In the past, this has meant a primary focus on web design practices and tools: Photoshop, HTML, FTP. Given the opportunity to take the reins this semester, we have decided to let these topics take a back seat and move in a different direction. "My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them. Pretty ruthlessly" - Sir Ken Robinson We will not be teaching this technology. We are interested in how to be web citizens, how to be fluent on the web to both promote your work, but also how best to stay connected to interesting and important developments in your field. We believe that Adobe Creative Suite and its ilk have been replaced by the likes of WordPress, Google, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter and Tumblr as the tools to master before establishing your presence on the web. We will be exploring these tools' potential in a practical sense as well as discussing how they are changing the industry. Part seminar and discussion, part hands on studio work, we are all very much looking forward to what we will be able to learn from this process.

In keeping with the new spirit of the course, we will be blogging all topics and assignments here, on the Window, and asking students to respond to readings and discussion in the comments.

Let's begin. Week 1 READ:

• Getting Real, Ch. 1 - 16
• What Should a Modern Library Be?
• What Should a Modern Library's Website Be?

WATCH:

• Hillman Curtis’s Artist Series: Milton Glaser
• TED Talk: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
• The Machine is Us/ing Us

CREATE:

• If you don't have them already, create Flickr, Google Reader, Delicious, WordPress, Twitter and Vimeo or Viddler accounts.

COMMENT:

• Write your thoughts on the readings as a comment on our blog.
• Link to your other sites and to any documentation that you create on your blog, in your Flickr account, etc.
• Link to all relevant blogs and feeds you have in your Google Reader.

Our goal for this week is to get the tone set and the dialog started. The next class isn't until February 5, so we want to have these lines of communication firmly established to stay in touch over the next two weeks.