Recently I have been teaching a class about collectivity and collaboration for designers. It's been a really beautiful thing to watch students begin the semester saying “I hate group projects,” and end the term completely changed. Students are put into groups and tasked with making a project that results in a publication. Along the way, they learn concrete methodologies for organizing and sharing work, as well as political concepts about what it means to really be together.
In making the course materials, I have been playing with a motif that's derived from blasting up the saturation on anti-aliasing. As a result, emphasis is placed directly on members of the edge. Where typically anti-aliasing would blend a foreground and background, here instead the difference is exaggerated and made colorful. To me, this serves as a visual representation of a critical point that comes to us from Critical Art Ensemble: solidarity through difference.
This course is taught at Pratt’s MFA in Communications Design. It is based on a model designed by Kimi Hanauer and Asad Pervaiz, and indeed it continues to develop in part due to loving collaboration of our teaching affinity group.
I love teaching this class!
Tagged as: