DMI Professor Jan Kubasiewicz at ICID and CAFA, Beijing, 2009
In October, professor Jan Kubasiewicz, DMI Coordinator, was invited to present a lecture titled "Design for Communication and Interaction: The Core Concepts of Dynamic Media and Its Pedagogy" at the International Conference on Interaction Design (ICID) in Beijing. Organized by Tsinghua University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Hong-Kong Polytechnic University the ICID conference was the first such event in China focused exclusively on the discipline of interaction design, and gathering designers and educators from America, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
Professor Kubasiewicz was also invited to present a lecture titled "Communicating in the Language of Dynamic Media" at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. The presentation was based on the paper of the same title published and distributed at the Icograda Education Conference as part of Icograda World Design Congress in Beijing, 2009.
In both lectures, professor Kubasiewicz addressed the core concepts of dynamic media and its education as practiced at the Dynamic Media Institute at Massart.
COMMUNICATING IN THE LANGUAGE OF DYNAMIC MEDIA
Jan Kubasiewicz
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the core concepts of dynamic media and its pedagogy as practiced at the Dynamic Media Institute, MFA design program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
As the program focuses on communication design, the notion of dynamic media is closely related to information and its broad range of meanings from information visualization to information architecture.
Furthermore, the notion of dynamic media is closely related to motion and therefore time. Motion, as integral to design, is considered a language of communication in our curriculum, and consequently, "motion literacy, the act of understanding how motion can be used to communicate more effectively" becomes an essential component of our pedagogy.
Lastly, dynamic media is related to interactive systems, an interdisciplinary field involving experience design, and engineering of mediated interactions among various participants and systems involved in the process of communication.
Accordingly, the discussion on dynamic media is arranged within the following three groups of concepts: Design for Information; Design for Time and Motion; Design for Interaction.
Dynamic media designers see the world as an information structure that communicates continuously. Their role is helping individuals to participate in the complexity of information in learning, understanding and making informed decisions as well as articulating thoughts, creating, and telling stories.
