Design Daze
As we prepare for the start of the Spring semester, I’ve been busy preparing for the launch of Design Daze here in the Digital Learning and Media Center (DLMC). Digital Design Daze are 90 minute workshops aimed at helping take a project from concept to prototype using digital tools that we have access to at Colgate. Some workshops will help learners ‘level up’ current things they might be doing already, others will introduce them to new ideas, tools, and workflows that they can use in the future. These sessions are targeted at current students, but are open to the Colgate Community at large, and will be held in the DLMC on the 5th floor of Case-Geyer on Wednesdays, starting February 1st.
What’s most interesting about Design Daze is that there is such a variety of things that we will be covering over the course of the semester. Many of these sessions will help build essential skills, such as the session about designing your own logo, which helps students become familiar with Adobe Illustrator. Being able to offer co-curricular sessions that are engaging and relatively short, we are hoping that we can offer community members the chance to take the first steps at learning a new program, or to apply their existing knowledge in new and interesting ways while simultaneously supporting the curricular goals of many classes on campus.
Further, we’ll be offering some new sessions that, transparently, are around new and emerging technologies. One of these is Erase All Traces: Object Removal in After Effects where we will USe Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite to erase objects from film using Adobe Sensei – a type of AI technology. While neat, and great for erasing the odd Starbucks cup left in the scene during filming, this is also a tool that raises questions about ethics, and how these creative tools can be used for more nefarious purposes. Discussion around this and other considerations will be at the center of several sessions as we think about how these tools will impact us both as an institution and a wider society.
It is our hope that some of these sessions will allow us to explore as much as the students are, and to learn some things about the practical application of these technologies in curricular and non-curricular settings. We’ll also be asking participants to think critically about the sessions and what they’ve learned in hopes of garnering insight into potential new initiatives or future iterations of Design Daze!
If you or your students are interested, please attend! There is information about each session at http://gatedlmc.colgate.domains/student-programs/. No registration required, come to as many sessions as you would like! We hope to see you there, and if there’s a session that you’d like to collaborate on or have a research interest in, please let us know!
