Session Organizer: Randall Hoyt, University of Connecticut
Wonder Twins Unite, Separate, or Fight!
De Angela L. Duff, University of the Arts
—
There is a proliferation of graphic design programs driven by a conflation of imperatives ranging from student desire, to administrative initiatives, to market demands. Graphic design programs are adapting – some readily, others less so – to the pressure to provide more experiences in dynamic media such as web, motion graphics, and mobile media. Parallel to these developments within the design education community is a related expansion of “digital media” programs. These programs vary as markedly as design programs with names like Computer Art & Design, New Media Studies, or even Architecture and Electronic Critique. These programs possess varying degrees of what might be called “graphic design” ranging from fully-integrated curricula, to a few courses to nothing. Some digital media programs share students cooperatively with design areas while others operate in completely isolation. What unites these at times disparate programs are the artifacts of their efforts: web sites, blogs, DVD interfaces, motion graphics and other interactive experiences. While no one program or academic unit “owns” these ever-emergent cultural and technological conduits each prepares its students to ultimately embrace them, albeit from markedly different origin point and methodology.
This session panel will bring together a diverse group of dynamic media practitioners from various design and digital media programs to define and explore this common ground and discuss tactics for encouraging collaboration between two related, but potentially separate, hybrid trajectories.
