As I am sure we are all aware of, there were several "Lunchtime Lectures", this semester, featuring candidates for our department of design. I missed the first one, but attended the remaining three.The first lecture I attended was Shawn Simmons': She works primarily with bookmaking. I should have taken more thorough notes. I thought I did, but I probably tried to retain it all. Anyway, I remember that she does have teaching experience and that she works with digital as well as print media. She talked about the importance of teaching students the basics of using the evolving digital tools. An example she showed us and talked about was a project she had her students do recently, in which they had to make some page layouts, and the pages had animated text. The purpose of this assignment was to give students experience in successfully creating a graphically-interactive text document that preserves form and functions.
But the lecture's focus wasn't entirely one-sided. As important as it is for design artists to develop expandable digital skills, retaining the ability to adapt layouts to the printed page is also important.
The artist also showed some very interesting book arts work of her own, featuring hand-crafted books that employed sculptural aspects. This was an exercise she also gave her students; not only were their final products to be well-designed and well-crafted, but they also were to maintain readability.I'll try to be more brief from here-on-out.
Phil Winfield: He gave an informative lecture about design and its importance and demonstrated this point with a survey of his career at LSU, rebranding their imagery, website, etc.
The part about the actual updating and the necessity of redesigning things was somewhat interesting. The most memorable point to me during this stage was when he showed and briefly described the original LSU brochure, and then showed us the documentation of the design process he used to recreate LSU's logos, brochure layout, revise its web layout.
Unfortunately, the lecture as a whole was for the most part boring because Winfield had so much to say about everything he and the design department at LSU worked on, publishing, distribution on campus, printing versus PDFs and web documents, etc.
Last but not least, Hannah Park:
In my opinion, hers was the most interesting lecture. She talked largely about the latest applications of digital artistic skills across media platforms. When she gave a survey of her work in the field, the most involved part of the lecture was one long-spanning project, which involved a lot of collaboration and carefully charted information gathering. Her primary project (still in progress) is an iPhone app for tracking light pollution.
She compiled research about pollution and its different forms before undertaking this particular project. One thing she hopes this app will do is to help raise awareness of sky pollution, which is statistically the least-considered form of pollution. Park described her design, approach, and interface, while the images of her slideshow corresponding to the topic at hand, adding relevancy. The entire process of building up the interface and gathering information was fascinating. Park hopes that one day soon, this application will become available to the world community, to use their iPhones to take pictures of the sky, particularly if the sky looks unusual or unclear when it should be. The goal of this project is to raise awareness about light pollution and collect data from cities around the world capturing the late evening and night sky. Perhaps, this would eventually lead to a dialogue of ways to reduce all forms of pollution, or maybe not. In any case, this was my favorite design candidate lecture because of the way Park is using design and design technology to actively engage communities around the world in this issue.
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