89025 Design Studio: Projection

Notes

This subject will not run in 2020.

Description

This is an umbrella subject that includes studios in sustainable textiles, visual communication, small patch product design, service design and interactivation design. A brief description of each studio is included below.

Sustainable textiles (hello@emmapeters.com.au)

This studio explores the intersection between textile design and sustainability issues, through both practice and theory. The textile and fashion industry is a global phenomenon that has significant environmental and social impacts. The studio critically investigates the central role of design in relation to sustainability in order to propose new material, ecological and cultural notions of textiles.

The focus is on innovation through an exploration of both making and thinking. Students are introduced to core ideas in sustainable textiles including systems and life cycle thinking; slow/fast fashion; design futuring; and the central role of the designer. The studio also explores a range of methods, processes and technologies including natural dyeing; sublimation/digital printing; slow stitch; and upcycling.

Visual communication (Erin.Turner@uts.edu.au)

Commercially, the future of visual communication involves designers working across multiple cultures and languages, and as such designers need to be able to work multilingually. The range of formats and types of content designers work with is also changing dramatically. Designers might now be asked to work with large data sets, tweets and hashtags, etc. With this in mind, students in this studio take content which comes from one media (eg twitter feeds and online news from a significant world event) and explore it through a different medium. For instance, taking online news headlines and social media posts from the Rio Olympic Games in 2016 or the Paris terrorist attack in November 2015, and revisualising this 'immediate' content in a physically material and traditional form such as a book.

Small batch product design (tom@tomfereday.com)

This studio involves students working with an experienced designer and educator making objects and accessories for small batch production realised to a high degree of refinement. This might include fruit bowls, candle holders, speaker frames, lamp shades; basically anything smaller than a piece of furniture. Focuses include: the value of prototyping for gaining insights through design; the importance of process; conceptual clarity; aesthetic refinement; and the material imagination.

Interactivation design (bertbon@xs4all.nl)

Interaction design focuses on human contexts and ways of operating, including user experience, tangible or screen-based interactions, and/or service systems. Students in each studio need to be highly motivated and self-directed. Depending on studio focus, the skills developed may be conceptual, strategic and system-focused, or enable designing with digital sensors and responsive electronics.

Service design studio (Thomas.Lee@uts.edu.au)

Service design sees services rather than things as the key unit of design practice. This studio involves students working with an industry practitioner or experienced academic on one or a series of projects from a service design perspective. It involves a combination of craft-based design skills with systems-thinking type approaches to complex problems. Design outputs are typically end-to-end and multi-channel, or at least informed by an ethos stemming from such considerations.