Minimalist Interactives and Environments

Offered as part of the Digital Media Studio group of courses, Minimalist Interactives and Environments responded to the uncritical obsession with limitlessness that pervades contemporary digital media consumption and culture. Across twelve weeks, the course invited students to explore a design approach that privileges limits and constraints by producing a series of six experimental, small-scale interactive designs and/or virtual environments in Unity or HTML. These works responded to, or adopted the tactics of, one or more of the following movements or practices, drawn from art and design, literature, game design, cinema, and more:

  • Minimalist painting and sculpture.

  • The Japanese concepts of ma and wabi-sabi.

  • Haiku and Imagist poetry.

  • Short stories and hint fiction.

  • The experiments of the French Oulipo group.

  • Microgames, and those produced with DIY game-making tools.

  • Microcinema, and the Dogme 95 manifesto and movement.

  • Photographic, literary, and cinematic vignettes.

  • The aesthetic reduction of bonsai.

  • The constraints inherent in many social media platforms and applications.

At the end of the semester, students curated and presented their series of works in a website, interactive, or virtual environment, and reflected upon how their understanding of their practice has deepened, shifted, and/or evolved across the semester. Classes ran twice a week, and were designed to be highly playful and experimental, where students had the opportunity to design with and within limits and constraints in various ways. This included lectures and discussions on the history and context of the above topics, writing and drawing exercises, hands-on conceptual activities, poetry writing and filmmaking sessions, and technical tutorials in Unity. I designed and delivered the course entirely from the ground up, including all lectures and class materials, lesson plans, and assignment briefs.

Digital Media Studio 1: Production

Digital Media Studio 1: Production is a core part of the Digital Media program, and introduces first year students to four key digital design disciplines: video editing and production, sound editing and production, digital environment design, and user interface/web design and production. In order to accomplish this, the course was structured around four small projects within each discipline: editing audiovisual material in Adobe Premiere Pro, designing and producing a set of graphic icons in response to a theme in Adobe Illustrator, creating a virtual Rube Goldberg machine in Unity, and developing a web folio using HTML and CSS that showcased the student’s work through the semester. The class sessions throughout the course occurred twice a week, and helped students to design and execute each project by offering a mixture of lectures on the elements and principles relevant to each discipline, software tutorials to prepare students for the technical aspects of each project, and individual and group exercises to encourage students to experiment with their ideas and develop their digital design practice. There was also a strong focus on critical reflection as an essential part of the creative process, as students were required to maintain a blog that documented their technical and conceptual work on each project. As well as teaching Digital Media Studio 1, I also served as course coordinator, and took the opportunity to refine, update, and streamline the existing teaching materials.

Principles of Play 1

Part of the Bachelor of Design (Games) program at RMIT, Principles of Play 1 took a broad view of game design and culture, across both pre-digital and contemporary contexts. With a core focus on critical analysis, the course lead first year games students through some of the key concepts of game design and studies: play, rules, games culture, social play, mechanics, interaction, characters, local game design, game genres, and cheating. Each week I built from a pre-recorded lecture from the course coordinator to help students understand, sort through, and make relevant each of these ideas. This involved designing each class to include group discussions on readings and ideas raised in the lecture, design activities to break down, analyse, and re-arrange historical and contemporary game designs, group play sessions of existing games to examine design decisions and play behaviours, and providing instruction and advice on various elements of academic writing practice, including research, structure, editing, and referencing. Students were assessed on their grasp of these ideas and techniques through three key assignments: an annotated bibliography, a close analysis of a particular game, and either an argumentative or exploratory essay on a topic or game of their choice.

Digital Media Specialisation: 3D Assets

Another Digital Media Specialisation option, 3D Assets led second and third year students interested in 3D design through a standard development workflow in Autodesk Maya. Various iterations of the course have covered the following:

  • Designing a 3D asset through research and the production of orthographic reference images.

  • Basic and advanced 3D polygonal modelling techniques.

  • UV unwrapping and mapping techniques.

  • Producing diffuse, bump, displacement, specular, and transparency maps in Adobe Photoshop.

  • Applying these texture maps via materials with Maya’s Hypershade.

  • Creating and using virtual cameras to frame and present the asset.

  • Lighting types and techniques, and getting the most out of materials through rendering.

  • Basic animation and motion paths as part of a render sequence.

  • Special effects, including animated UVs, lighting effects, and particle systems.

  • Compiling the final render sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro.

  • Preparing the project for export, and uploading and presenting the model on Sketchfab.

As well as designing and producing all teaching materials, I led a series of technical tutorials on the appropriate software, and provided detailed feedback on the student's work as they progressed through an asset sheet, milestone presentation, and final submission. An earlier iteration of this course also had students using Unity to deliver an interactive, digital diorama that showcased their asset.

Digital Media Specialisation: 3D Virtual Environments

Digital Media Specialisation allows second and third year Digital Media students to specialise in a creative field of their choice. Students interested in 3D digital-virtual environments were able to undertake my 3D Virtual Environments class, which I designed and delivered. It led students through the conceptual and technical process of producing a 3D digital-virtual environment within Unity, and each week focused on considering and implementing a certain formal element in the software:

  • Designing an effective spatial layout and producing high quality design documentation.

  • Considering form in virtual environments with basic polygonal modelling in Autodesk Maya.

  • Making virtual environments interactive with C# scripting, including logic and syntax.

  • Colour in virtual environments through materials in Unity, and producing seamless textures in Photoshop.

  • Implementing sound in Unity, and considering 3D and adaptive sound.

  • Lighting a virtual environment for emotional effect and increased navigability.

  • Basic animation in Unity to bring life and character to a virtual space.

  • Best practices for exporting from Unity to produce builds for multiple platforms.

  • Presenting a virtual environment through a simple webpage on itch.io, or through a UI menu.

As well as designing and producing all teaching materials, I delivered a series of lectures on the weekly topic with design theories and conceptual examples, led a series of technical tutorials in Unity and Autodesk Maya, and provided detailed feedback on the student's design documentation, reflective presentations, and final environments.

 

Media Cultures

Media Cultures precedes Emerging Digital Cultures in the program structure of Digital Media, and focuses on developing critical thinking skills in four key areas: research, explanation, analysis, and argumentation. Across a weekly lecture, assigned reading, class discussions, group exercises, and a series of written assignments, my role was to ensure that students were able to critically analyse and respond to the various concepts, works, and issues that they will encounter as digital media consumers and practitioners. My focus was on helping students to think through critical ideas in class, and providing detailed feedback on the resulting assignments. These consisted of a short blog post describing a media culture, a wiki post analysing the role of media within a certain culture, and a substantial essay on a particular digital media work. Later iterations of the course investigated and applied concepts and movements from art history to contemporary digital media, and focused much more on developing a single essay across a number of drafts as the primary assessment task.

 

Emerging Digital Cultures

Visual Literacy for Digital Media was retired in 2017 and replaced by Emerging Digital Cultures. While the course structure remained roughly the same — each week was still centred around a relevant digital media issue — my role developed from simply delivering lectures to also building off and guiding class discussions in response to weekly group presentations from the students on the topic for the week. The assignment briefs also shifted focus, from critical-creative writing in Visual Literacy, to independent, student-driven projects in a variety of forms: graphic design, web and app design, video editing and production, sound design, and digital environments. A key objective of Emerging Digital Cultures is for students to develop a critical creative practice. In other words, to understand not only how to use various pieces of software, but to also be able to articulate why they have made the various creative decisions that they have, how their work reflects certain ideas and values, and how it responds to theory, the work of other artists and designers, and one or more of the key issues discussed in the course.

 

Visual Literacy for Digital Media

Visual Literacy for Digital Media, part of RMIT's Digital Media program, was designed to equip students to think critically about the issues that they may encounter as digital media practitioners. By conducting a weekly lecture, guiding in-class discussions that responded to an assigned reading, and providing detailed feedback on assignments, I introduced students to a wide range of ideas pertinent to digital media, including technosolutionism, big data, and privacy. As part of this course, I designed and produced three tutorials for the Unity game engine, covering the interface, positioning GameObjects, and implementing basic textures, materials, scripts, and cameras. 

 

Certificate IV in Printing and Graphic Arts (Multimedia)

In this SBAT, students were introduced to a wide variety of multimedia concepts and techniques, including:

  • Graphic design in Adobe Photoshop and CorelDRAW.

  • 2D animation in Adobe Flash.

  • 3D modelling, texturing, rigging, and animation in Autodesk 3DS Max.

  • Video editing and production in Adobe Premiere.

  • Laying out and publishing high-end PDFs in Adobe InDesign.

  • Designing and producing a basic game design document.

My responsibilities were to supervise students as they undertook self-directed, computer-based learning, to facilitate that learning with consistent advice and feedback on work, to run training sessions to teach the software, and to mark student work via email. I also designed and produced a set of training materials in the use of Adobe Premiere, including importing, editing, adding effects, and exporting high quality videos.