Digital Explorations: Works from the CMU Schools of Architecture and Design

On our first floor, sit down and view two hours of programming from the School of Design and the School of Architecture. Digital Explorations includes recent kinetic typography projects by design students and faculty, as well as computer animations produced by architecture students.

Suguru Ishizaki, Assistant Professor in the School of Design, has been studying kinetic typography since 1996. The recent Bible Project, in which Ishizaki and his student collaborators chose "The Book of Psalms" as material, explores how kinetic typography may compliment a recorded voice. As Ishizaki states: "We are interested in finding out if kinetic typography can complement the voice by providing an additional layer of emotion." Research on the Bible Project is partially sponsored by the Intel Corporation and still ongoing.

Another project, also directed by Ishizaki, is Communicating Driving Safety to Teens through the Internet, funded by PennDOT. Traffic crashes are the number one cause of teenagers' deaths. Ishizaki and his design student collaborators explored the use of the Internet as a vehicle for reaching teenagers who are already drivers, as well as prospective drivers. They used kinetic typography with fictitious testimonials using voice and found that kinetic typography can effectively enrich the voice by representing the speaker's mind, emotion, and internal voice.

Other communication design projects originated in the Course Time, Motion, and Communication, taught by Professor Dan Boyarski. They also demonstrate an on-going investigation into communicating with words, images, sound, and movement. Executed on a computer, the projects rely on an understanding of time: rhythm, pacing, and phrasing, as well as an appreciation of appropriate form -type or image. Among the pieces shown will be a series of one-minute treatises on "yesterday / today / tomorrow" for a design congress held in Seoul, Korea in late October 2000.

Digital Explorations also features works from the Computer Modeling Il class taught to upper-level students from the School of Architecture. The projects originated in this course are cutting edge computer-animated stories about, in, and around architecture. In addition, animations that study architectural projects in their contexts will also be shown. Most projects are drawn in Form Z, Alias Wavefront, or MAYA.