fall 2006
ARI 221K / ARC 221K:
Visual Communications in Architecture III
Instructor:
Samantha Randall
Marla Smith
Course Description
VisComm III is the capstone visual communication studio in the undergraduate sequence. Embracing a synthesis of content and technique, this studio will enable you to begin to develop your own visual language, integrating information and media to communicate both design process and product.
Design as, ultimately, a speculative practice - to speculate: put forth an idea, uncertain of the outcome - A range of communication tools enable us, as designers, to hold "visual conversations" with ourselves, and with others. Whether by hand or by mouse, however, the value of the tool is directly tied to the limitations and opportunities that it presents as a mode of communication. Communication with others is key to realizing a design product, while communication with oneself is also a primary design practice. You will quickly see the tremendous possibilities that open up when working across different media as needed to craft your ideas, and to discover the ways in which your working process informs your eventual design product.
In this year, you will be introduced to a set of basic digital media techniques, and challenged to intersect them with your already developing skill sets in sketching, hand drafting, rendering and composition. You will learn to build your own visual syntax for architectural and interior design practice, and will explore the ways in which your visual language impacts your design language and ideas. In addition, the logistics of working in the virtual environment will also require you to engage and master the basics of digital input and output, and establish a logic for your digital file management.
This studio will also deal in depth with what we call iterative thinking - the generation of variation. Using permutation, abstraction, transparency and collage as tools for speculation, you will see how explorations in different media allow feedback loops to emerge -- creating a dialogue between precision and abstraction, between 2 and 3 and 4 dimensions, between analog and digital media, between "responses to the response" - as you learn to test your developing formal and analytical languages with greater complexities involving social, theoretical and material practice.
Course Objectives
- to explore theoretical and practice-based implications of a range of visual languages
- to create a solid foundation of digital media techniques for visualization in design
- to integrate analog methods (hand drafting, sketching, rendering and modeling) with digital processes.
- to develop the ability to work between different media and techniques as needed for different modes of visualization
- to integrate visual techniques of representation, analysis, and production within the design process
Full Course Description [pdf]