Course Description

__This seminar will introduce techniques of digital workflow that integrate software packages into the design process. We will treat the mouse as our pen, the screen as our paper, Maya as our tool, ready to be explored, questioned, probed, and dissected. I request that you employ a playful attitude towards design. Like the game of a young scientist, you must explore, test, and catalog the successes and failures of how you employ the tools of the software.

__The playfulness must not be timid, we must move beyond any fear, learn to leave the wavering line of the unknown. Digital tools provide a vast and often intimidating collection of options with no clear correct answer. From this we have the opportunity to develop our own unique set of skills; techniques for shaping the way we approach design, architecture, and a more dynamic way of understanding. The digital is an ever increasing presence in our contemporary environment; this presence will not diminish, but grow. We, as architects, can seize this new array or opportunities to change our field and its influence on contemporary society.

__Software primarily developed for the film and visualization industries has created a new playing field. A practice untested by hundreds of years of technique development and answers. There are only a few that go before us, paving but a few of the roads that may open to you as you expand your catalog of techniques. The road, however, is not paved by mindless fools, but by those well trained and versed in the techniques of architecture, art, science, mathematics. These disciplines are all reshaped into a digital space, and since the field of software aided design is still very young, we have the charge to test all mediums to best cultivate what tools we can use to refine our designs. The class with primarily focus on Autodesk Maya as the main design tool, but we will also incorporate packages such as Rhinoceros 3D, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Aftereffects, and any other tool we require.

__Students should leave this course with an even broader scope of questions than when they began, and a blurry sense of how they can continue the search for the never ending answers to those questions. The computer will play a part in their design methodology for the rest of their lives, and we will only advance as far as we are willing to explore. The knowledge gained from our playful indulgences provide the fuel for a more informed and precise discussion on the evolution of our field and the techniques that drive it.