Advanced Digital Media

With modeling applications becoming more diverse, intuitive, and commonplace, there is a renewed questioning of the position of geometric modeling within the design process. Animation, rendering, and modeling are understood as smaller elements of a much larger entity known as multimedia. While modeling necessarily remains the basis of CAD, this course explores new directions by shifting the focus from geometric modeling to the narrative structures enabled by multimedia. The main idea of this course is to develop alternative ways of visualizing and expressing design problems using the digital medium. Over the last three years, this course has fostered an increasing number of independent design projects based on emergent technologies such as multimedia authoring tools and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). The course will develop around the themes of narrative and navigation taken broadly. Narrative will designate an abstract, knowledge-based approach to developing visual themes, whereas navigation will designate a closer adhesion to a spatial metaphor. It is our expectation that the two themes will become interchangeable or, at least, cross paths several times over the course of the semester. Basis of Final Grade: There will be seven short assignments, all aimed at providing one with a gradually deeper understanding of Lingo, ActionScript and VRML. The scope of the assignment cycle will be to clarify a series of instrumental questions. A short midterm project will demonstrate the student\’s ability to synthesize these processes and use them to explore an open-ended design problem. The final project for this course will demonstrate the student\’s ability to apply Lingo, ActionScript or VRML to an independent content-driven design project.