UW-Stout Department of Art and Design

As a military dependent, I had the opportunity to live all over the United States and in Europe. However, I am a mid-westerner at heart. From North to South, I have spent most of my adult life traveling and living within an hour or so of the I35 corridor. Like the Mississippi river, it is a major artery that acts as an important lifeline for this nation—transporting goods and services, people and culture, ideas and innovations.

To the casual observer, the Department of Art and Design at UW-Stout represents an anomaly. A small, Midwestern university within a rural community that somehow has been able to gain a reputation as strong art and design program with high career placement and innovative graduates working in a variety of art and design related industries around the globe.

It’s no secret. The Department of Art and Design at UW-Stout places an emphasis on quality teaching and the department is successful at developing new concentrations, while maintaining an interdisciplinary program because the faculty have historically collaborated with one another. I feel this provides an opportunity for our students to receive the attention they need in the classroom, while providing a more holistic experience related to both art and design.

It’s a Midwestern thing.

Teaching Multimedia Design

One of the challenges multimedia design educators face in an undergraduate program such as ours is the ability to cope with the constantly evolving and broadening digital technologies impacting both traditional and new media outlets. It’s like trying to paint a mural on a moving bus.

With this increasing convergence of technology and design in a virtual space, it is easy for people to forget how to systematically identify key elements. Inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s explorations in the geometry of thinking, one of the mnemonic devices I use with my students for classifying multimedia is to consider the volumetric form of a tetrahedron. The elemental form seems somewhat precarious, with its odd angles and pointed edges. However, as you begin to unfold the form, you begin to identify with the individual faces. Each one represents key components of multimedia, with unique characteristics.

The four faces represent key elements of multimedia; technology (the structure), form (the design), space (the content), and the construct (information architecture). Problem solving requires being able to properly identify and work with these elements. Design requires the ability to properly balance these elements to maintain their appropriate size and scope.

By comprehending how these elements function together, multimedia designers then can identifying and explore the synergy between hardware, software, interactivity and user experience to maintain more effective user-centered design. Or, they can just continue to throw paint—hit or miss—at moving objects.