classes

DESIGN DIALOGUES
Peter Lunenfeld | Design Dialogues
Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design
This open forum addresses the major issues of art, design, and communications in a transmedia era. This is a seminar based around visiting speakers and field trips. Students develop fluency by discussing the state of the field with its leading lights.Our visitors will be doing demos, talking about their working methods, discussing their future projects, and asking students about their plans. Critiques are incisive and tough but always informed and constructive. This seminar is a vibrant opportunity for the Art Center graduate community to meet with professionals from the arts, academia, entertainment, technology, and design fields to share insights and experiences in an informal, but informed, setting. The title of the course, Design Dialogues, is meant to be an invitation to students to interact on a personal level with our guests. We are working for an environment in which critiques are incisive and tough but always informed and constructive. The requirements are simple. Attendance and discussion are absolutely mandatory. Grades are determined by participation in class discussions and critiques. Final requirements include an 4-6 page paper due Week 13.

MEDIA HISTORY & THEORY
Peter Lunenfeld | Special Topics Seminar
Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design
The required texts are Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Monfort, eds. The New Media Reader, Utopian Entrepreneur, Brenda Laurel, design Denise Gonzales-Crisp Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles, design Anne Burdick, and Peter Lunenfeld, USER: InfoTechnoDemo, visuals Mieke Gerritzen. Other readings will be handed out in class. Attendance is mandatory. Grading will be determined on the basis of participation in discussion, completion of the assignments, and a final paper, 6-8 pages in length.

BESPOKE FUTURES
Bespoke Futures:Media, Design, and the Future
Peter Lunenfeld | Special Topics Seminar
Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design
In this mixed seminar/studio we will be investigating the power of media design to craft compelling visions of the future. Harnessing the power of scenario development — as pioneered at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s and used throughout the business world today — the seminar will develop three to four compelling new visions of the future via media design. We will be trying out different kinds of language on for size, determining what modes, strategies and discourses best “fit” our own, particular flavors of practice. We’ll be working with other faculty, including Bruce Sterling, and other advisors to help craft these future scenarios.We will be reading Peter Schwartz’s seminal book on scenario planning, The Art of the Long View, selections James Ogilvy, Creating Better Futures, selections from The New Media Reader to examine how the pioneering practitioners of multi-media computing like Turing, Weiner, Englebart & Kay developed a language to express their vision of the future of the “dream machine,” Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media which offers a taxonomy of practice for using these machines to craft these visions, and Systems of Survival, by Jane Jacobs, which is subtitled “A Dialogue on the Moral foundations of Commerce and Politcs.” The ultimate question of the seminar/studio concerns design itself, and is both simple and profound: What is the point of it all? There will be a two page response due Week 7, and a final eight to ten page paper due between weeks 13 and 14.

COLLOQUIUM
Peter Lunenfeld | Colloquium
Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design
col·lo·qui·um (k-lkw-m)n., pl. col·lo·qui·ums or col·lo·qui·a (-kw-).
[Latin conversation, from colloqu, to talk together: com-, com- + loqu, to speak; see tolkw- in Indo-European Roots. Important derivatives are: loquacious, circumlocution, elocution, soliloquy, ventriloquism.]
Conversation
1. An informal meeting for the exchange of views.
2. An academic seminar on a broad field of study, usually led by a different lecturer at each meeting.
3. An address to an academic meeting or seminar
4. The part of the plaintiff’s pleading in an action for slander that avers the defendant spoke the slanderous words concerning the plaintiff for the subject matter in question in a certain conversation.
This fall, the MDP colloquium will covers a range of ideas and issues. First, and most importantly, this is the one place that the entire program comes to share ideas, discuss projects, air concerns, and simply be together. We’ll kick start that process by spending the first two weeks getting to know each other and our work. The other major conversation starter we’ll be engaged with is discussing selections from the Design Research Reader that will be coming out later in the fall. Finally, we’ll discuss thesis projects and progression through the various stages of the MDP. Days with marked with * indicate we’ll break at 12:00.