Mike McAuley asked:
"My question is not particularly challenging but it is possibly one which
a number of interested parties want to know. Where within the four
specialisations would a design area such as Visual Communication Design
sit in this new model? Would drawing/sketching be located in any or all
of the specialist tracks? What about a traditional craft based subject
such as Illustration? Would a student simply choose to go to an
institituion which specifically offered it, or would that be provided
within your model? I don't wish to sound boxed in here as I am very
excited about UCI's vision, but the traditional subject defined model
is the one within which I work."
Part of the answer is easy and not very interesting and part is a bit
more thought provoking.
The easy answer is that at UCI there is already a School of the Arts,
which has departments of studio art, music, drama, and dance. The
topic of visual communications brushes up close to what some of the
faculty in this school do, so in designing the School of Design we
opted to focus on topics that were clearly unrepresented on campus.
I think we were excessively conservative in this regard, but that's
the route we took.
The more interesting question comes up with regard to the teaching of
drawing or sketching. We had several conversations about this topic,
and if you look at the notional curriculum you will not find a class
on sketching. Instead there is a class on modeling and
representation. Some of the SD committee argued for a class in
sketching, using the "training the eye as well as the hand" argument.
While I was initially very skeptical of this I came around a little
bit towards supporting that. My major concern however was that
sketching is but one way of representing a design and increasingly
(IMHO) a less efficient and less effective way of representing design
concepts. My bias towards computing leads me to supporting the
teaching of a wide variety of computer based modeling and
representation techniques and tools, including not only
computer-based sketching but 3-d wire frame modeling, CAD, and so on.
Beyond a simple argument about the relative merits of pencil-in-hand
versus mouse-in-hand representation. I have one more concern about
sketching. It is useful (mostly? only?) when designing things that
have a physical 2- or 3- dimensional final reality. Sketching is
great if you are designing something that is ultimately produced on a
flat piece of material. Sketching is useful, though far from ideal
when dealing with a three dimensional artifact: you have to choose a
point-of-view (or a selection of POVs), deal with perspective, and so
on. Sketching is not very useful, however, if the subject of design
has no intrinsic two or three dimensional existence. Software
certainly fits into this category; so do a variety of interactions
(such as my automobile driving example). Entities whose character or
form changes over time (perhaps very rapidly) are probably not
ideally suited to being treated by sketching, as opposed to some
other modeling form that can deal with the time dimension.
I think we at UCI will have to have several more conversations,
however, before we really resolve this issue and design this part of
the curriculum at the next lower level of detail.
Dick
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