Art, Design & Mathematics

Reflection:  MAC and Design

 

Design is one of the most important and most complex courses we teach in the art department at EdCC and much of the complexity comes from the fact the course is not media specific and often is a students introductory course to studio art.  As the course syllabi reflects our department is interested in students demonstrating an ability to apply the elements and principles of design and projects are designed to “begin with subject interpretation and translation, progress to abstraction.”   Students often long to bring in specific and recognizable images into their work and the departments desire is to see students able to work with elements in a way that brings them to more creative and abstract thinking.

 

When Rebecca Hartzler and Deann Leoni first invited the faculty at EdCC to participate in the MAC project I was unsure as to how to fit yet another outcome into an already full courses.  As I began to think about what felt to me to be a more natural connection I realized that an ongoing weakness in my students work is an understanding of how to move beyond realistic images and how to create work that is structural more complex.

Both of these weaknesses are challenging.  The first is difficult because the art department is interested in students understanding of the elements of design to be something they can apply to a variety of art media such as clay, paint, photography as well as, the possible applications in other disciplines.  For example: how might they think of texture in their writing?  We want students to think as creatively as possible.  The second weakness is difficult as students work with more challenging projects through the quarter.  For example, at the beginning of the quarter students are given projects that are open-ended but fairly structured but by the end of the quarter I give students projects like the assemblage that require they select a bunch of seemingly unrelated objects and create a piece that is unified.  Students often struggle greatly with this particular assignment and turn in work that is unfocused and a mish/mash with no clear concept or focus.

 

The MAC project seemed the perfect opportunity to work on a real weakness felt by my students and me.  I really needed to enter this with an idea of how it could really help my students learning and my teaching.  I am very pleased with the outcomes.  In the first project, which involved the project most explicitly, students worked with geometric form and tessellation as well as color theory.  Many of the students responded to the discipline this project required.  It helped that there were many examples throughout the world of how this structure has been used to great effect.

 

 In the second project (reduction printing) students absolutely did use the knowledge of pattern and structure gained in the tessellation project.  Often in this assignment students love the printing process but are at a loss as to how to move beyond the single 4”x4” individual print to envision something larger in scale and more complex.  I was particularly pleased with the results in this assignment.  Before we were done each student had created somewhere around 40-50 prints and had to edit, organize and create visually strong and larger scale pieces.  They did so with great success. 

 

Finally, in project #3 (the assemblage) students have tremendous difficulty in conceptualizing apiece because they become overwhelmed by the parts.  With few exceptions all the students were able to grasp more fully how to bring all the parts together.  They had systematically been working with smaller units all quarter.  The thing that changed was now the units seemed disconnected.  They all found ways to create unity. 

 

As an endnote the students did complete one more final project.  The fourth project was their final and even this project was strengthened.  Their final was to design their own design problem and solve it.  The clock is the only image I was able to get of the final projects but they to were wonderful.

 

My beginning objective in the MAC project was to see if students working with a single geometric unit and learning how to build more complex patterns from that unit could use that experience to help them in design work throughout the quarter.  My objective for my students was to explore all the elements of design and to apply the elements and principles to unify, well crafted finished projects.  Unifying the elements is always the challenge and they more than met my course objectives and their feedback was very positive.  This definitely strengthened the course and my ability to help students work with more complex design problems.