Issues in Digital Design is a class in the New Media department of the school of Informatics. It is taught by Steve Mannheimer and TA’ed by Todd Shelton. While an interesting class, there are some issues with the design of the class.
The largest issue for me was the name. When I read “Issues in Digital Design” it conjured up images of discussion of Copyright law and other problems that digital designers will experience over the course of their careers. Instead, the class discussed things that designers should think about while creating a design. However, the topic seems to better a title of Digital Design Considerations or something with a more preparatory flavor than one that is more negative like Issues.
Another area where I feel the design was flawed was the Electronic Design Journals. The concept is great: have the students go out into the world and find interesting designs, then discuss them. In the process of discussing them, the students learn more about design in general. However, as discussed in the first day of class, “design” is such a general term that finding designs to talk about is incredibly difficult. Assistance was attempted by mentioning potential topics at the start of lecture such as a Netflix-for-books concept. However, even with the suggestions, the overall concept feels like the Penny-Arcade comic under this paragraph.
There is such a thing as too much freedom. In fact, the LA Times posted an article in March of 2009 reporting the findings of a study by Kathleen Vohs. She discovered that, “even making pleasant choices can deplete one's mental resources, making a person less able to concentrate later.” When she tested this theory on some of her students, she also found that those that made decisions spent less time doing other important tasks such as preparing for tests.
In the same article, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, Barry Schwartz, found that “The mere act of thinking about whether you prefer A or B tires you out. So if I give you something else that takes discipline, you can't do it -- you'll quit faster. If I have lifted weights in a gym, later trying to lift a 30-pound weight is impossible."
While these studies are not completely analogous to anything in the class, they do help show issues with the EDJs. Even when students are only suggested to do 3-5 a week, this request becomes difficult to fulfill as students have other responsibilities and after writing one or two blog posts our minds are strained.
The reason for the strain is the lack of structure to the EDJs. At their heart, they’re just journal entries, but we are supposed to find designs to discuss. If we don’t find anything in our day that sparks our mind into a flurry of discussion, we are forced to come up with a topic to write about. As previously discussed, our only point of reference for topics is the general idea of Digital Design.
My suggestion would be to require that between 2-3 EDJs need to be done each week and that each week have some sort of theme that narrows the topic down, even slightly. So Week 1 could be games, and week 2 could be movies. Narrowing the choices and giving the students an easier time to pick what they want to talk about will allow them to produce the quality of blogposts that will be suitable to help expand their design abilities.
Another place where this mediated experience was a little flawed was the use of tools. I understand the concept behind making sure the tools were not the focus of what made us great designers. However, I know that some of my fellow classmates were “advertised” this class as a Photoshop class. I was not one of those students, but given how little we actually used Photoshop, I don’t understand why it was used at all. I’m sure that Todd would agree that when you first start using Photoshop, most of the time spent creating or editing images is taken up by figuring out how to get Photoshop to do what you want it to do. It seemed like a waste of resources to even bring up Photoshop to be necessary to be used if there would be no in-depth explanation of how to use it or a recommendation of a Photoshop Classroom in a Book.
For comparison, my N110 Class, Visualizing Information, was not technically an Illustrator class. However, the Illustrator Classroom in a Book was required and the weekly assignments were lessons from the book. Illustrator was the tool used for projects but was not the focus the class. I would recommend that for N201, Photoshop is given a more important role in the class, considering it is the standard for image editing, or have it removed entirely from the class. If your decision is to remove it entirely, then I would recommend that you make that clear to the advisors and make it one of the first things you mention when you go over the syllabus and introduce the class to the students.
My last point of contention with the design is the decision to treat us like art students. Part of what makes New Media students unique is that we’re not just art students and we’re not just CS students. We’re a little bit of both: a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, a little bit chocolate and a little bit avocado, etc. I was originally a CS major until I came to understand that I’m not capable of the higher levels of math required and all of my hobbies were more creative as opposed to code. From what Todd has told us, it sounds like he started off as wanting to be more of an art student until he found out that he was really good, and actually enjoyed, programming in Flash. It does our class a disservice to only have one half of what makes us who we are as NM students cultivated.
I know that this post comes off as highly negative and that was never my intention coming into this post. I have enjoyed the class overall and, if nothing else, I learned about the multitude of things to consider when creating an experience. I thought it would be an interesting topic for my final blog post to be about the class since you have even said that the class could be considered a mediated experience and/or game making it “fair game” for discussion. I hope that neither of you take any complaints/criticisms too personally and would like to thank you for your time.
