80046 Design Studio: The Object
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particular session, location and mode of offering is the authoritative source
of all information about the subject for that offering. Required texts, recommended texts and references in particular are likely to change. Students will be provided with a subject outline once they enrol in the subject.
Subject handbook information prior to 2020 is available in the Archives.
Credit points: 12 cp
Subject level:
Undergraduate
Result type: Grade and marksRequisite(s): 80065 Critical Image Studio: Image Activism and Documentary Practice AND 80066 Expanded Image Studio: Post Photography
These requisites may not apply to students in certain courses.
There are course requisites for this subject. See access conditions.
Description
This studio subject is designed to enable collaboration through the examination and development of 'smart objects'. This could involve for example, the development of playful and intelligent applications, smart objects with practical and marketable applications, objects with energy awareness, sensing systems or devices designed to adapt to/suit users and their behaviour. Students collaborate to examine the potential for imbuing objects with new audio, visual and mechanical capabilities by transforming the experience of using objects and devices. For the photographer this studio enables a useful fusion of modalities and re-situates passive (unresponsive), static media or time-based (fixed) media in a paradigm of user-centred, dynamic and responsive interaction, by challenging students to re-think and re-invent ways of communicating through physical experience.
Subject learning objectives (SLOs)
On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:
| 1. | Context: Students will use object-based exercises and tasks that enhance the design skills |
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| 2. | Concept: Students will develop innovative and research-based solutions to the specific demands of the project reference work from other disciplines to support an individual’s project. |
| 3. | Process: Students will work iteratively through the design process by responding to critical feedback to propose alternate solutions and problem based learning strategies |
Course intended learning outcomes (CILOs)
This subject also contributes to the following Course Intended Learning Outcomes:
- Ability to take autonomous responsibility for actions and decisions (A.1)
- Ability to work cooperatively and professionally as part of a team, initiate partnerships with others, take a leadership role when required, and constructively contribute to peer learning (C.1)
- Ability to communicate ideas effectively in a variety of ways, including oral, written and visual (C.2)
- Ability to engage in and contribute to studio discussion (C.3)
- Ability to develop innovative approaches (I.1)
- Ability to initiate and execute meaningful self-directed iterative processes (I.3)
- Ability to produce inspirational responses that exemplify integration of learning experiences (I.4)
- Ability to innovatively use photographic and media technologies (I.5)
- Ability to recognise and engage in a diverse range of technical and practical contexts (P.1)
- Ability to apply relevant digital and/or analogue techniques and technologies to image-based practice (P.2)
- Ability to analyse, synthesise and formulate complex ideas, arguments and rationales and use initiative to explore alternatives (R.3)
- Ability to reflect and engage in self-critique and critical thinking (R.5)
Teaching and learning strategies
Learning activities in the form of projects involve research, visual investigation, idea generation, creative problem solving, critical reflection, analysis, progressive refinement and the visual, oral and written presentation of completed work. The formation of peer learning groups is encouraged. The subject includes a proportion of flipped learning activities and inquiry-based, project based,studio based, experiential and practice-oriented learning activities.
Content (topics)
Subject content will vary depending on design tasks, but generally will include:
1. Research-based design tasks – exercises that incorporate knowledge from lectures and external research.
2. Weekly lectures – theory lectures that are intended to provide context and direction for research.
3. Readings – this studio involves a significant degree of reading, essential for satisfactory involvement in both the lectures and tutorials.
4. Tutorials – chiefly for the discussion of the content of readings and lectures.
5. Workshops – practical and precedence based classes designed to further the central design tasks.
Assessment
Assessment task 1: The Chindogu
| Intent: | Task 1: The Aesthetic Object (individual work, 20%) We are surrounded by designed objects that have highly specific uses within our culture. They exist as part of an assemblage of tools, instruments and technologies. New and speculative uses prompt the design of unexpected objects. In the tradition of Chindogu ingenious ‘everyday’ objects are designed as solutions to unexpected and imaginary problems. Often these gadgets incorporate two familiar objects. Their synthesis creates a bizarre third. They are particular hybrids because they serve peculiar uses. Chindogu are ‘tools’, but in the loosest sense. The Unexpected Object / The Hybrid Object In this assignment you must invent your own piece of Chindogu: an unexpected object that hybridizes objects of the everyday and is ‘almost useless’. Your object must exist as a model or prototype and a visual and oral proposal. It should be designed in the spirit of the everyday but be born out of an unanticipated and almost redundant use. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Objective(s): | This task addresses the following subject learning objectives: 1, 2 and 3 This task also addresses the following course intended learning outcomes that are linked with a code to indicate one of the five CAPRI graduate attribute categories (e.g. C.1, A.3, P.4, etc.): A.1, C.3, I.1, P.1 and R.3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Type: | Presentation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Groupwork: | Individual | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight: | 30% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Criteria linkages: |
SLOs: subject learning objectives CILOs: course intended learning outcomes |
Assessment task 2: The Non Static Object
| Intent: | D.D.D.Desk About ‘Three White Desks’: “Three White Desks is a story made manifest in household furniture. The use of transport crates as plinths allows the narrative to transfigure itself as materiality, and to deliver and support the more recognisably material art objects.
Starling commissioned a German cabinet maker to produce a copy of a desk that was designed by artist Francis Bacon for Australian writer Patrick White. A hi-res 30MB image was sent to the maker as reference. The German cabinet maker then used his mobile phone to send a lo-res photo of the desk he made to a second cabinet maker in Sydney, who then made a version of the desk based on that photo. When the Sydney cabinet maker finished making his version, he emailed a medium-res photo of it to a third cabinet maker in London who made the final copy. The three desks are presented in the gallery, each one atop its own delivery crate, together with an oil painting by Roy de Maistre (who assisted the young Francis Bacon in acquiring commissions for his furniture and interior designs, and was Patrick White’s lover), and a large print containing images of the desk in situ and other related artworks and interiors.”
Requirements: A multi-step process allows an artist to relinquish part of the creative process to an uncontrollable event or action. As such, the element of chance comes into play, and the artist is exposed to a new way of making and thinking that they had not previously encountered. Students are required to reflect on Simon Starling’s process for Three White Desks. How can a similar investigation be used in your own practice? What multi-step method can you introduce into your own making that allows you to both relinquish some control, and introduce the unpredictable? Part of this assessment requirement is that students present work-in-progress to their lecturer each week. This will ensure that the student is engaged in the multi-step process, and can negotiate the inevitable hurdles that come up when working with chance. Students are expected to experiment with, research around and articulate their ideas and decision-making process. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Objective(s): | This task addresses the following subject learning objectives: 1, 2 and 3 This task also addresses the following course intended learning outcomes that are linked with a code to indicate one of the five CAPRI graduate attribute categories (e.g. C.1, A.3, P.4, etc.): A.1, C.1, I.4, P.2 and R.3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Type: | Portfolio | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Groupwork: | Group, group assessed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight: | 20% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Criteria linkages: |
SLOs: subject learning objectives CILOs: course intended learning outcomes |
Assessment task 3: The Agent
| Intent: | Task 3: Adopting Technology (Individual work 50%) As Issac Asimov suggests in his Three Laws of Robotics there are three rules pertaining to robot behaviour:
not harm humanity or by an action, allow humanity to come to harm”. In writing this fourth law Asimov implies that the robots existence as creation by man is in fact for man. Part of its purpose is to care for man, or at very least, protect him. This is one of conditions of this objects existence. Not all objects, however, love us as much as robots might. The Autonomous Object For this assignment conceive of an object that does not care for its creator, nor its user. Conceive and construct an object that exists for the sake of itself. It must undertake an action entirely for itself, or at very least exhibit autonomy or independence. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Objective(s): | This task addresses the following subject learning objectives: 1, 2 and 3 This task also addresses the following course intended learning outcomes that are linked with a code to indicate one of the five CAPRI graduate attribute categories (e.g. C.1, A.3, P.4, etc.): C.2, I.3, I.5, P.1 and R.5 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Type: | Presentation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Groupwork: | Individual | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight: | 50% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Criteria linkages: |
SLOs: subject learning objectives CILOs: course intended learning outcomes |
Recommended texts
100 Artists Manifestos, Edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev. Penguin Classics, 2011
Baudrillard, Jean. Photography, or the Writing of Light. In CTheory, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. CTheory.net, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=126.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Art of Disappearance. Translated by Nicholas Zurbrugg. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1994.
Berlin, Isaiah 2000 The Roots of Romanticism, Pimlico, pp.1- 20.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Animals That Live in the Mirror, taken from THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, Penguin Classics, P18-19
Clark L 'Nostalgia of the Body' in Krauss, R 1997 October; The Second Decade pp.25-49 History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996."
Critchley, Simon 2004 Very little… almost nothing, Routledge, pp.99 - 162.
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion, 2000.
Gell, A 1992 "Vogel's Net: The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology" Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics. J. C. a. A. Shelton. Oxford, Clarendon Press: 40-63."
Krauss, Rosalind E, Bois, Yve-Alan. Part Object, taken from Formless A User's Guide, Zone Books, p152-161
Krauss, Rosalind E., ed. October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, p 24-49, 2003
Light Art from Artificial Light: Light as a Medium in 20th and 21st Century Art Translated by Peter Weibel and Gregor Jansen. Edited by Peter Weibel and Gregor Jansen. Ostfildern: New York: Hatje Cantz 2006.
Pietz, W. ‘Fetish’, Ch. 15 in Nelson R. and Schiff, R. (eds.) Critical Terms for Art
Price, Seth. Dispersion (2008)
Ryui, Koji. Liminal Spaces and Strategies in the work of Lygia Clark, 2009
The Virilio Reader. Edited by James Der Deriam. Maldon: Blackwell Publishers, 1998
Virilio, Paul The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. 1st ed. New York: Dutton, 1970.
*This list will be subject to addition during the semester.