Online courses directory (19947)

This course provides a broad overview and substantial introduction to the theories and practices of current object design. Illustrated using recent work from established and emerging designers, this course provides a journey through the "meaning-making" processes that lead to iconic products, and a glimpse into the world of the designers who create them. During the second half of the Twentieth Century, the clearly defined profession of industrial design broadened and fragmented into a defuse array of specialized practices. Rather than confining their activity to shaping objects for everyday use, object designers have expanded their practice by borrowing from fields such as sociology, anthropology, art, film, and management consultancy, thereby uncovering new ways in which design can affect our lives.

Beginning with a tour through design’s pluralism, this course delves into the power relations and semiotic structures which lie behind object making. It analyzes the process of design as it unfolds in the designer’s mind, on paper, through model making, and via other generative “thinking tools”. Examining the motivation of designers today, it reveals radical, avant-garde positions, as well as progressive, ethical, and sustainable practices that question the profession’s quiet complicity in unchecked mass consumption. This course concludes by examining the working contexts of today’s object designers, discussing the often "slippery" nature of client relationships, as well as the joys and perils of independent practice. Making Meaning: Designing Objects offers insight into the way today’s object designers operate, the theories that guide their decision-making, and the tools and processes they use to get results.

This course is an introduction to using the Web for artistic creation. It is a "literacy" course designed to introduce you to the various core components that make the web such a powerful platform for art – art that is not only visual, but sonic, physical, interactive, and social. It will give you the basics (in terms of knowledge and code templates) to make things that run in browsers using:

• Animation with graphics and sound,

• Interaction with graphics and sound,

Just as you don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car, you do not need to wait until you are an expert programmer before creating work for the web.

There is a vast array of tools for making things for the web. Making things for the web is a process of constant learning and discovery – not one of knowing everything first and then making. It is also a process of ripping and mashing rather than writing everything from scratch. Getting comfortable with this process is the first step, and is the approach we take in this introductory course.

By the end of this course, you will be making things with the real-world core components that give the web its potential for art, but you will have only just begun. More importantly, you will understand what you have to learn more about to accomplish your artistic objectives, be able to recognize things and be able to evaluate their value to you, and have a command of the terminology you need to search for and discuss your needs and interests with the huge community of people on the net with experience (and code chunks) to share.

Why JavaScript and the Web?

There are some excellent special-purpose coding platforms for artists out there such as Processing for interactive graphics, Chuck or supercollider for synthesis, graphical languages such as Max/MSP or PD for interactive sound and graphics. These platforms have extensive communities of people to share experience and code with. However, these special-purpose platforms are not standard web building and design tools.

What they offer is a direct path to achieving a specific artistic objective, but it is at the expense of a more general applicability of language, tools, and skills that would allow you to interact with people in the web-based creative industries. They do a great job at "hiding" things you may not want to worry about as an artist, but dealing with a bit of the scaffolding is necessary if the web is the space you have chosen to embark on for developing your work.

This course will take you through the basics you need to develop artistic content for the web using standard web tools – JavaScript, html, and several fundamental libraries. It will point you to exactly what concerns an artist most – making creative content. It will guide you and teach you what you can ignore for now in order to focus on artistic content, but will not prevent you from integrating with the vast world of the web and learning and using some of the scaffolding if and when you should need it later.

Our basic approach to achieving this goal is to "throw you in to the deep end" with a set of code templates for meeting artistic goals – interactive graphical mobile applications using physical sensors, for example, and explaining simple things you can do immediately to explore and implement your own ideas.

The advantages to JavaScript:

• It is the language embedded in all browsers today.

• It is general purpose, and makes no assumptions that limit your artistic objectives.

• You can deploy all your work on the web for others to experience.

• You only need to learn one language for writing both client and server code.

• A *lot* of other people use it that you can share and communicate with.

• It is a marketable skill.

Thus, we are not restricting you to special-purpose tools that don't generalize well to the web – but that doesn't mean you will have to write a bunch of code not related to your artistic vision. The "template" technique used in this course is a "middle way" that gets you up and going fast, but provides a path to future growth and connection to the real world.

You will learn to recognize patterns of code that you need not know how to write. This will provide you with a basic understanding of how things work in the real world (let's call it literacy). This will help you find, recognize, and use chunks of code that others share, and it will allow you to focus on code directly relevant to artistic content.

This will give you the foundations you need to go on learning on your own by exploring the unstructured wealth of material available out there on the web to pillage and modify for your own work. That is how real web programmers work all the time, anyway!

Animated GIFs are kind of like the flipbooks of the digital age. Quick and easy to produce and distribute, but with almost endless creative possibilities, the creation of animated GIFs is a great way to begin to explore both digital and traditional time based media. The popularity of animated GIFs in social media and advertising, the rise of short form video sharing sites like Vine and Instagram, and the ability to easily create short animations and videos with mobile devices make this kind of "micro cinema" an important part of our contemporary media landscape. Course will include introduction to creating GIFs with Adobe Photoshop.

Learn how the music and video technology industry operates behind the scenes, and get career advice directly from industry professionals. In six 50-minute video sessions, meet over fifteen mentors who share their experiences of working at Pandora, LANDR, Sonos, Native Instruments, and more. Access to exclusive product case studies will allow you to develop the tools for a smoother transition into this industry, giving you a look into the day-to-day life of various roles - from marketing to engineering. Plus, engage renowned music tech industry experts and entrepreneurs in online AMA’s and one-on-one office hours.

Continue learning with Real Industry mentors through the online course Careers in Media Technology.

Where did graphic design come from, and where will it go next? This fast-paced introduction to graphic design history will change your understanding of everything from fonts and letterforms to posters and brands. Discover how printers revolutionized society when they created open access to information. Explore the visual systems that inform graphic design practice—from handwritten alphabets to online publications. Learn how avant-garde artists, architects, poets, and painters shook the world by reinventing mass media. Pursue the dream of a unified civilization held together by neutral typefaces, international pictograms, and global brands—and see how subcultures rebelled against cultural uniformity by forging their own visual identities. Thinking about history will open your eyes to new ideas and diverse practices. The course is taught by Brockett Horne and Ellen Lupton, renowned authors and leading faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In a series of dynamic conversations, they will introduce you to fascinating people and processes that changed the way we communicate. Test your knowledge with short quizzes, and stretch your own design practice by responding to inspiring creative prompts.

Course image A. M. Cassandre. The uncompromising one, the strongest, 1925. Lithograph.
Collection of Merrill C. Berman

In this course, we’ll explore what it means to work collaboratively in building a more sustainable and equitable society for all people. Students in this course will learn to acknowledge their context, privileges and disadvantages, and the different ways they have of knowing the world. In this course, learning and teaching will be generative, fluid processes. Much of the hard work of this course will be outside the classroom: reading, thinking, organizing and providing situated context for our ideas so our class colleagues can come to a fuller, richer understanding of our own shared and individual experiences. The students and instructor will come together to discover and explore the ideas shaped by the readings, and build emergent systems that provide deeper understanding of our own boundaries and possibilities.

This course explores the primary entertainment vehicles that students are exposed to on a daily basis through a series of interlinking concepts such as the digital audio workstation, a Kraftwerk 3D concert, interactive toys, robotics in art, 3D projection mapping, Pokémon Go! and much more.

This examination is supported by a critical evaluation of the various kinds of technologies that have emerged along the continuum of entertainment technology.

How have these technologies shaped and even created new art forms? How have these transformations informed styles and genres across theater, recording music, feature films, integrated media events, game play from consoles to hand-helds and the explosion of commercially accessible virtual and augmented realities?

Information will be synthesized through an understanding that the common thread has been the ever-expanding role of computing technologies in all forms of commercial and popular art.

This course is an introduction to the methods of cinematic storytelling, with an emphasis on visual grammar and techniques. Students will learn story structure, and how to develop written or spoken ideas into a clear dramatic narrative arc, and how to edit and juxtapose images to create a clear and emotionally engaging result. They will also learn how collaboration and the ability to show work in progress, giving and getting notes from peers, make everybody’s work better.

3D modeling and animation have transformed numerous fields, including filmmaking, computer games, architecture and product design. Yet the underlying basis of high-quality 3D production originates in traditional design and animation methodologies. This course provides an introduction to the exciting world of 3D content creation, while emphasizing its connection to the creative thought process. Students will learn an overview of the artist workflow as it relates to modeling, texturing, animation, lighting and rendering. This course offers a new dimension to the process of filmmaking and design.

This four-session course explores a practical approach to composing and producing music with Native Instruments Kontakt. We will cover the most important technical and aesthetic aspects of creating music with the industry-standard Kontakt sampler. Weekly assignments will give you practical experience in putting these technical skills in a musical context. Topics include Kontakt library, signal flow, layering, working with drums, building custom sampled instruments, file management, modulation, audio FX, automation, and DAW integration. At the end of this course, you will have created four original compositions with Kontakt, in addition to numerous custom sampled instruments.

Over the past fifteen years, many of the music industry’s greatest artists have made public valuable information about how they created their iconic sounds. Through the release of memoirs and interviews, their techniques—once considered closely-guarded industry secrets and the keys to their success—are now available to anyone who wants to use them. The information, however, is scattered amongst hundreds of sources. This class strives to gather up that information and assemble it in a way that allows the student to witness the historical evolution of the industry and, even more importantly, make immediate use of each technique as it is presented.

This course extends our existing background in Deep Learning to state of the art techniques in audio, image and text modeling. We'll see how dilated convolutions can be used to model long term temporal dependencies efficiently using a model called WaveNet. We'll also see how to inspect the representations in deep networks using a deep generator network, leading to some of the strongest insights into deep networks and the representations they learn. We'll then switch gears to one of the most exciting directions in Deep Learning thus far: Reinforcement Learning. We'll take a brief tour of this fascinating topic and explore toolkits released by OpenAI, DeepMind, and Microsoft. Finally, we're teaming up with Google Brain's Magenta Lab for our last session on Music and Art Generation. We'll explore Magenta's libraries using RNNs and Reinforcement Learning to create generative and improvised music.

A series of 4 exercises exploring various principles of design, time-based media, and animation while learning industry standard 2D animation software Adobe After Effects. These exercises will focus on the design, editing, timing, and animation skills needed to complete our larger class project "Title Transformation". Individual exercises will be graded separately. There will not be a final critique of the work, but there will be brief daily feedback from the instructor, and students are encouraged to seek feedback and critique from each other. Although there's a lot of software to learn during this exploration, we must never lose sight of the fact that we are designers and communicators first, and software operators second.

"Projectionists -- pull curtain before titles" This note was attached to cans of film reels containing Otto Preminger's 1955 classic, The Man with the Golden Arm. Before this, movie theaters didn't even open the curtain until the opening credits were over. The Man with the Golden Arm marked a turning point when film titles became more than just a dull roll of credits and became part of the artistic statement of the film itself. Preminger had collaborated with legendary graphic designer Saul Bass (Links to an external site.) to create a simple but arresting cut out animation that changed how we view the title sequence forever. Since that time, title sequence design has become an art form of it own, blending graphics, typography, as well as both traditional and experimental film and animation techniques to create unique visions that are sometimes more fascinating than the movies and television shows they were created for.

The role of the music technologist has changed throughout history, though one trait has stayed consistent: the necessity for the individual to operate across multiple mediums and disciplines. This project-based course provides an opportunity to synthesize the key concepts and skills learned in the Foundations of Music Technology Program, and enables students to establish meaningful connections between the contents of each course. The course will have students acquire real-world artistic experience, through the critical examination of historical works, and the completion of a final project, which demonstrates their ability show how they themselves have become The Modern Music Technologist.

This course explores the role of computation in the conception and representation of shape and form. With a recognition that artists, architects and designers learn best when creating new work, programming will be taught as a creative medium. In the Python language, students will develop, analyze and critique algorithmic approaches to digital drawing, modeling, and projection. Specifically, the powerful, robust, and well-documented Python Rhinoscript library will be introduced and explored in detail. This API allows Rhinoceros modeling software to be scripted with text-based code. Scripting in this manner can automate existing processes and can lead to novel kinds, relationships, and orders of shape and form. Architects, sculptors, and any artists or designers interested in the either fabrication or communication of form and shape will recognize the importance of projection–the the transformation of three-dimensional geometry onto a two-dimensional picture plane, cut sheet, paper or screen. As a result, this course focuses not only on the generation of geometry, but the output of geometry. In parallel to extending students' technical proficiency, this course will touch on the conceptual and theoretical implications of algorithmic design. Each of the five lessons will build upon each other to develop an understanding of the Python language, algorithmic strategies, and digital geometric craft (the interrelated structures and topologies that make up digital models). Beginning with the most primitive geometric element–the point–the course will build curves in two and three dimensions, organize those curves to function as the input for methods that generate surfaces. Subsequently, the course will return to the realm of drawing as surfaces will be used to generate lines and curves in concert with orthographic and perspective projection.

If the negative comes alive in the darkroom, then a film comes alive in the edit bay. There is a lot an editor must know to keep organized and hold onto the director’s creative vision. In addition, a videographer with knowledge of how the footage will be cut and assembled will be a much stronger shooter. In this class you will jump into the art of editing your work, exploring the tools, workflows and practice of editing.

In this course, we will introduce you to the basics of programmable electronics using Arduino. We will start off with simple concepts around designing and creating light sculptures with LEDs that blink to create a variety of patterns and sequences. The course will expand this project to show you how to dim and fade LEDs using a technique called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). This same technique will be used to mix colors of a tri-color LED to re-create any color in the rainbow and produce your very own disco light show!

Throughout this course, we will introduce the basics of programming in Arduino, introducing a handful of useful constructs in C \ C++ programming.

The Practical History of Typography serves as an introduction to The Complete Typographer, and provides a historical appreciation of the art and science of typography: display lettering (both hand drawn and mechanically generated), and text typefaces—a “historical bucket” approach. The course examines typefaces associated with key design and technological developments of the 20th century—the Bauhaus, the New Typography, etc.—with an eye towards critical analysis of form, moving right up to 2017, including advances in generative type and variable fonts for web.

This course proposes a deepened survey of current practices in generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation. In this advanced class, we study how evolutionary computing, neural networks, and procedural generation can produce novel and valuable artifacts. We survey advances in search-based methods and procedural generation. We look at how to formalize aesthetic measures and learn how creative systems can be evaluated.

We illustrate how these algorithms have been used in numerous examples of past and current productions in visual art, new media, music, poetry, literature, design, architecture, games, moving images, and robot-art. Students get to practice these algorithms first hand and develop new generative pieces through assignments and projects in MAX.

Finally, we discuss the societal and ethical implications of the automation of creative tasks, from the fear of artificial intelligence to the algorithmic bias, and from the most technophobic visions to the most technophilic ideals.