Overview

Design expression and how we represent the world have evolved side by side. In the 1960s, at the advent of digital media, designers began to consider video as a means of design interpretation, analysis, and modeling. Recognizing its ability to communicate complex relationships through time and space, this line of inquiry was broached but largely fell by the wayside. Emerging simultaneously, spatial mapping and layered planning inspired the precursors to Geographic Information Science. GIS, with its logic-based, layered modeling, thrived while video and time-based media as tools of design remained in its shadow.

The social sciences have been using time-based media (film) as a means of analysis for much of the 20th century. In the early years, digital media was limited to the average person; however, the 1980s and 1990s changed this paradigm with large leaps in technological progress. Video, and the means to disseminate it, allowed more wide use. Internet accessibility, streaming media, relatively small and cheap capture devices, cell phones, big data, and user-friendly software have increasingly made time-based media accessible to and easily used by everyone. Video, digital sequences, slideshows and animation, along with the ability to edit, reformat, and distribute, opened new possibilities to produce and present information.

Film and video possess analytical and communicative properties that can reveal multiple layers of information through a single vantage point. Unlike a still image, time-based media is capable of integrating the static and the fluctuating, the relativity of time, motion, and transformation compressed into a singular gaze. It can reveal both visible and invisible flows and forces. Time-based media allows us to engage time and change in the design process in order to express complex spatial relationships, evolving and multiple perspectives, analysis of performance, interpretation of seen and unseen forces, networks of flows, and experience.

This seminar course will examine the practice of capturing, producing, analyzing, and relaying moving images as a method of inquiry for design. We will focus on the analytical and communicative qualities of time-based media [recorded sequences, video, slideshows, animation, simulation, remote sensing, etc.] as a human-landscape intermediary that has the ability to alter understanding and evaluation of the environment. We will explore theory and techniques from a range of disciplines – art, design, sociology, anthropology, medicine, etc.

The course will meet weekly for brief discussions/presentations/workshops to direct our inquiries, discussion of foundational readings and ideas, media workshops, screenings, local field trips, and/or student presentations of work. Throughout the semester, students will generate exploratory work that focuses on methods and techniques, and two larger projects that engage the themes of the course.

Project Highlights

Motion Sketches

Motion Sketches are short compositions (between 1-3 minutes) that are used to test conceptual ideas, experiment with equipment and software, and refine techniques.