Digital Media Design Research Articles

A Cognitive Load Approach To Learner-Centered Design Of Digital Instructional Media And Supporting Accessibility Tools

Instructional material provided through digital media and various types of educational technology may be able to support students with a wide range of learning abilities, providing better educational opportunities for a greater number of students. Technology-based instructional design, however, often does not take into consideration variation in student abilities. Research on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) promotes the idea of providing students with a variety of means of representation and expression. Investigations into cognitive load note the impact of the complexity of information content (intrinsic cognitive load) and the type of information presentation (extraneous cognitive load) on student learning. The work provided here is part of a larger effort to understand the influence of a student-centered approach to technology-based, instructional design in the field of high school chemistry. In the present study, results from a study by Carlson, Chandler, and Sweller (2003) of cognitive load were replicated in a digital media learning environment to determine whether the elements of cognitive load theory can be extended into design requirements for technology-based instructional materials. In a two-by-two experimental design, participants were required to learn contents in organic chemistry that was designed with either high or low intrinsic load and high or low extraneous load. Results were congruent with Carlson et al. (2003) and further support the following claims: (1) when compared to low element interactivity, high intrinsic load leads to decreased performance and higher subjective workload, (2) extraneous load reduction can promote performance gains and reduction in workload for tasks with high element interactivity.

Understanding and Improving Cross-Cultural Decision Making in Design and Use of Digital Media: A Research Agenda

In the global economy, design of digital media often involves teams of individuals from a variety of cultures who must function together. Similarly, products must be designed and marketed taking specific cultural characteristics into account. Much is known about decision processes, culture and cognition, design of products and interfaces for human interaction with machines, and organizational processes, but this knowledge is dispersed across several disciplines and research areas. This article reviews current work in these areas and proposes a research agenda for fostering increased understanding of the ways in which cultural differences influence decision making and action in design and use of digital media.

Closing the Gap: Flexible and Dynamic Design Education to Better Prepare Digital Media Design Students for Professional Practice

The dynamic and fast changing nature of digital media presents many challenges for design professionals as well as for design educators. Managing the increasing complexity of technology is one of them. Surprisingly, the digital media design industry's switch to multidisciplinary collaborative teamwork as a response to the increasing complexity of technology has been rarely anticipated by higher digital media design education perhaps because subject 'silos' make collaboration more difficult. Major research into the employability of graduates from design disciplines in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia revealed that employers are concerned about the preparedness of undergraduate digital media design students when entering the profession. The research highlighted the lack of professional skills and soft skills such as verbal communication of ideas and teamwork. Clearly it is time to respond to the widening gap between professional practice and design education. Currently under development and testing at an Australian university is a new learning and teaching model, referred to as the POOL Model. This new model is a multidisciplinary system of interdependent collaboration and expertise exchange across university, industry and community sectors. The Pool Model is based on existing resources and implemented as an integral part of the curriculum at undergraduate level in order to prepare students for collaborative multidisciplinary practice and meaningful careers in industry. This paper describes the development and implementation of an alternative learning and teaching model. The rational for the development of the model is described and its evaluation through the application of accepted research principles and methodologies.

The Consciousness of Japan-Brand in Digital Media Design Education

The Consciousness of Japan-Brand in Digital Media Design Education

디지털미디어 디자인학과의 교과 과정 현황 및 교과 과정 제안: 계획 및 평가 프로세스를 중심으로

미디어의 발달과 통신 기술의 발달로 인하여 디지털미디어는 다양한 분야로 진화를 거듭해 왔다. 이러한 미디어의 발달은 디자인 전반에 영향을 미쳤을 뿐만 아니라, 과거 페이퍼 중심의 작업에서 컴퓨터중심으로 디자인 시스템을 변화시켰다. 디지털미디어 디자인은 다양한 사회적 환경의 변화에 따라서 태동되어진 학문으로 다양한 미디어와 컴퓨터의 발달에 바탕을 두고 있다. 또한 이는 시각 디자인을 기반으로 하여 경영학, 컴퓨터과학, 인간공학 등 다 학제간의 융합이 요구되어지는 학문이기도 하다. 그럼에도 불구하고 국내 대부분의 4년제 디자인 관련대학 교과과정은 창의적이고 분석적인 인력보다는 기능적인 인력양성에 편중되어 있다. 이는 디자인 관련학과가 실기위주인 예체능 계열에 속해져 있을 뿐만 아니라, 다 학제간 교류와 연구가 미비한 까닭이다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 국내 디자인 전공의 교육과정을 분석하고 교육의 현장과 실무현장에서의 차이점 및 문제점을 계획 및 평가 프로세스를 중심으로 파악하여 개선된 교육과정을 제시 하고자 한다. 이는 다 학제간 영역이 포함된 차별화된 통합 교육과정모형으로 차세대 디지털미디어 인력양성에 도움이 될 수 있을 것이다. Digital media has evolved in different areas as a result of the development of media and communications technology. The development of such media has also affected design in general as well as the design process systems focused on computer systems. Specifically, study of digital media design is based on a variety media and the development of computers due to social and environmental changes. Additionally, study is required on the convergence of variety of research including business, computer science, and human ergonomics. Nevertheless, most curricula in domestic universities are biased towards training practical manpower rather than creative/analytical manpower. For this reason, interchange between and study in multidisciplinary courses is desirable. Therefore, this study analyzes the curricula of departments of multimedia design of major universities and suggests enhanced curricula based on an analysis of the current state and understanding of the problem.

The POOL Model: Foregrounding an alternative learning and teaching approach for digital media design in higher education

Recent studies show that current higher digital media design education generally fails to equip students with the expertise and skills suited to the requirements of the industry. This is a result of design education largely adhering to a curriculum model developed for and applicable to multimedia design practice in the 1990s. Utilization of this model persists, although it has become increasingly unviable due to rapid technological advances and a resultant shift in the industry away from the individual designer and towards collaborative team design. An alternative learning and teaching model is currently under development at a regional Australian university, referred to as the POOL Model. This new model is a multidisciplinary system of interdependent collaboration and expertise exchange across university, industry and community sectors, intended for implementation in undergraduate curriculum to prepare students for collaborative multidisciplinary practice and meaningful careers in the industry. Using data obtained by industry, design educators and students, this article evidences the rationale for the development of the model, which will form the basis for the ongoing development of the new curriculum through trial and revision.

Design and Development of Digital Media for Performing Endobronchial Ultrasound-Transbronchial Needle Aspiration

PURPOSE: Poster presentations are a popular method of displaying information at conferences and are used increasingly for teaching. Digital media, however, allows for wider dissemination and rapidly bridges the divide between creation and implementation into practice of new medical technologies. The purpose of this project was to develop an educational tool using digital media in order to assist practitioners in the strategy, planning and performance of endobronchial ultrasound -transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA).

Collaborative design: Improving efficiency by concurrent execution of Boolean tasks

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide design and engineering professionals with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. As efficiency is one of the most important requirements in most design tasks, in this article, we contribute a novel collaborative design approach to improving efficiency, where a complex design task can be divided and executed concurrently by multiple collaborative designers. This approach is particularly effective for design tasks where Boolean operations – widely supported by most CAD applications – are heavily used in design activities, such as architecture design, mechanical design and digital media design. We have designed and implemented a prototype system CoAutoCAD to test the approach and to demonstrate a variety of collaborative design activities.

Increasing authenticity through multidisciplinary collaboration in real-life scenarios in digital media design education

Undergraduate digital media design education is linked to a professional or vocational model, given that students are typically focused on the industry and its employment opportunities. Introducing authentic real-life scenarios in digital media design education is an effective strategy to replicate industry and the profession in order to prepare students for a successful transition from the classroom to their future multidisciplinary collaborative work environment. Linking industry and education in the scenario allows students to explore workplace issues and interact with practitioners, enabling them to understand the realities and complexities associated with multidisciplinary teamwork within the sector in which they will work. This article overviews the design of a real-life scenario to foster collaborative learning for digital media design and information technology students. Key findings include the fact that the majority of students indicated a future preference to work on real-world projects, they found the integrated feedback from an industry professional helpful, and more complex projects of a higher standard were completed. Students also experienced ‘authentic’ challenges during the collaborative process (e.g. communication challenges) and which reflect those of industry. The study also revealed that the introduction of multidisciplinary teams leads to a more enriched learning environment for all participating students.

Inspiring Innovative Design Integration by Collaborative Exploration of Boolean Operations

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide industrial design communities with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. Innovation is an important requirement in most design tasks. This paper presents a novel approach to inspiring innovative design integration in a horizontal collaboration process. The approach allows individual designers' works to be integrated and multiple design choices to be explored. The technique is currently applied to design work involving Boolean operations-widely available in most CAD operations, where a major technical challenge is to integrate a group of concurrent Boolean operations for design exploration. The approach is particularly helpful to inspire innovation in the integration phases of industrial design tasks such as accessory design, art design, and digital media design.

Exploring New System of China Digital Media Design Related Undergraduate Education

In recent years, China Digital Media Design related undergraduate education has developed into great dimensions while producing a lot of problems. Now cause of rapid development, Disciplinary Location, Training Objectives and Curriculum require study. Firstly, the paper points out the scope and general process of Digital Media Design through an analysis of properties of digital media industry. Secondly, the paper studies the current status of Digital Media Design-related undergraduate education from the policy of Chinese Ministry of Education and the practice of representative universities. Through questionnaire survey of Digital Media Designers from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the paper points out the problems of China Digital Media Design related undergraduate education. Finally, paper brings forward the right direction of new system of China Digital Media Design related undergraduate education.

Elvis sings for the BBC: broadcast branding and digital media design

This essay uses a striking example of digital remix promotion - BBC Radio 2’s Elvis ad - to examine developments in the contemporary branding and broadcast environment. Developing work by John Caldwell, it examines the Elvis ad as a ‘deep text’, a promotionally reflexive articulation by media industries about the nature of corporate media identity and aesthetics. Suggestive of the BBC’s attempt since the late 1990s to make its brand ‘sing’, and relating specifically to the visualization of radio in the digital age, the essay uses the Elvis ad to investigate the performance of network personality in the multi-channel era, the growing role of brand/design companies such as Red Bee Media, and the operational and ontological transition of the BBC to a digital media world. More generally, the essay considers the relation of found-footage promotion to the ‘spatialization of audiovisual culture’.

A Case for Drawing

Architecture faculty continue, at times contentiously, to debate theroles that hand drawing and digital media should have in the practicesand education of architects. Some argue for the computer as the"new pencil,” while others maintain that the pencil is irreplaceable. A survey conducted by the authors suggests that the academy itself mayrest in a dichotomous position of committing more resources to digitalmedia than hand drawing while simultaneously indicating that both typesof media are valued about equally. Rather than reinforce an oppositionalrelationship between the hand and the computer, this paper aims toreveal current trends regarding the roles of hand and digital designmedia in the academy and to provide a review of the primary benefits ofhand drawing within an environment that is, seemingly, preoccupied withdigital media.Hand drawing provides unique contributions to and opportunities within the development of architectural thought and work. Maintainingsketching and precision hand drawing as fundamental activities of thearchitect extends the post-Renaissance tradition of architecture as a distinct design discipline directed to architectural ideas and relationships.Furthermore, hand drawing creates unique opportunities for imaginative transformation, for bodily engagement and accommodation, and for preconditioningthe qualities of a built work and therefore should remain asignificant component of the discipline.

Half-Baked Logo Microworlds as Boundary Objects in Integrated Design

The paper addresses the problem of fragmentation of the communities involved in the design of digital media for education. It draws on the experience gained at the Educational Technology Lab in the design of Logo-based microworlds with three different platforms respectively based on component computing, 3D game engines and 3D navigation with a GIS. In this paper I use the term half-baked to describe a microworld which is explicitly designed to engage its users with changing it as the main aspect of their activity. I discuss this kind of microworld as a tool for integrated design involving people with diverse expertise and/or roles to communicate. These kinds of microworlds implicitly exist within the community, but they can be explicitly designed mediated and put to use in the role of facilitators for integrated design and development to enable a growing communication amongst researchers, technicians, teachers and students. A template for presenting microworlds which was constructed through the experience with four such integrated communities is used to describe for each respective case the design principles, the affordances, the histories of development and the variety of emergent microworlds.

E-Learning and Economic Development.

In this article, our experience in the development and realization of e-Learning courses in Slovenia is described and discussed. Slovenia, the most developed republic of former Yugoslavia, became an EU member in May 2004. In 1991, after its independence from Yugoslavia, Slovenia’s transition to a free market economy resulted in lost jobs and an unemployment rate of 12%. In 1999, as the Institute for Symbolic Analysis and Development of Information Technologies, located in Velenje, Slovenia, we decided to offer several online courses to help unemployed people gain the skills and knowledge needed for employability in information technology. We drew on our previous experience teaching online courses at Sarajevo University after the Bosnian war and on the experience of West Valley College from Saratoga, Silicon Valley in e-Learning. Over the last four years, we organized and delivered e-Learning courses in digital media design and production, with good results. Several students found jobs and changed their perception and attitude as they became more self-confident. We believe e-Learning can efficiently enhance lifelong learning and support economic development, especially in new member countries transitioning from former socialistic to free market economies.

Information architecuture as reflected in classrooms

AbstractInformation architecture (IA) has been a hot topic in recent years. However, what constitutes IA is still being debated. While this study seeks to explore IA curricula and the perspective of educators, it does not attempt to define IA. Research undertaken for this paper centered on the examination of IA courses offered in North American universities. An analysis of 40 IA course descriptions available on the Web revealed that courses go by many different names. IA content/course coverage can be categorized into four types: IA elements, design, implementation technologies, and digital media design. Academic disciplines relating to IA education include library and information science, information technology, business administration, literature, arts, and design as well as continuing education programs. Issues revealed by the collected data are discussed.

Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction

The article explores the spatial practices of film in order to better understand the design of digital interactive media. The criteria used in the design and selection of the film image are discussed and a novel view of film as a pragmatic and highly economical form of picture making is proposed. The difficulties are highlighted of simply transferring such imagery to an interactive context, but it is argued that the same guiding principles can be applied in the newer medium. It is suggested that the demands of visual interaction are leading to the development of new pictorial modes, but that much work remains to be done. In particular it is proposed that the mature expressivity of traditional film is a goal to which designers of pictorial interactive media should aspire.

Washington State University

Washington State University is in Pullman, on the state's eastern border. It is Washington's land grant (state-operated) university, conducting basic and applied research and providing public service statewide. The university consists of 10 colleges and a graduate school. The Department of Teaching and Learning works primarily with preservice and in-service educators and emergent instructional designers. The program emphasizes the development of instructional media that often includes the design and production of digital instructional media. The Wazzu Widgets project is a project designed for students of instructional media production who have advanced digital production capabilities.

Computer-generated physical modelling in the early stages of the design process

This paper illustrates some of the opportunities arising from the introduction of computer-generated physical modelling 1 1 This notation of what may be commonly referred to as Rapid Prototyping was found by the author, for the first time in William J. Mitchell, ‘Change, Time and Speed’, Thresholds no. 16, Dept. of Architecture, MIT, 1998. in the early stages of the architectural design process. The use of this technology in the design process differs from previous research and practise in that it looks at the use of computer-generated physical modelling recursively in design process rather than as a means to create a final presentation model [W.J. Mitchell, M. McCullough, Digital Design Media, Van Nostrand Reihnold, New York, 1994]. Previous research in the field by the author identified recursive strategy in the design process as the area in which computer-generated physical modelling offers unique opportunities to the designer. Three unique advantages in the use of computer-generated physical modelling technology are illustrated by three case studies. These advantages are: (1) understanding kinetic design, (2) understanding design involving complex geometry and (3) understanding design at the interface with the human body.

Building a Better Hothouse

If you put creative people in a hothouse setting, innovation will naturally emerge. John Seely Brown, director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [1] collaboration of art and digital technology is one of the most exciting research trends of the decade. It has given rise to a rarified design discipline of fashioning new sites for innovation, new hothouses for collaborative projects. major players are, of course, government, educational institutions and corporations, each with their own resources, interests and intentions. Universities house a broad array of specialists, for instance, while corporations have deep financial resources. Essential to the fertility of any hothouse is interdisciplinary collaboration that attempts to move beyond the narrow focus of traditional models of research. In practice, however, neither corporate nor traditional academic cultures have proven flexible enough to nurture the collaborations between software engineers, artists, designers, business people and social scientists that are needed for the design of ground-breaking new digital media. As a result, a number of new media programs in art schools have been created wit hout the traditional divisions between the academic and corporate worlds, [2] forming collaborative research and learning environments that attempt to bridge the gap between art and science first noted by C. P. Snow in the 1940s. The clashing point of subjects, Snow wrote, two disciplines, cultures--of galaxies, so far as that goes--ought to produce creative chances. [3] movement to create new centers reflects the pervasive influence of Xerox PARC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory as paradigms for collaborative digital media research. Xerox PARC is the quintessential corporate think tank, and, since 1993, PARC's Artist-In-Residence program (PAIR) has teamed practicing artists with in-house researchers who work with similar digital media. One of PAIR's goals is to influence PARC's research culture: is a conscious attempt to boost, alter, nudge and in a minor way redirect the creative forces of PARC by providing alternative viewpoints, theories, personalities, and methodologies within the halls, offices, and long corridors and around the steaming coffee pots of the community. [4] These collaborations may indeed alter the corporate culture, but the artists remain outsiders, unable to directly influence research. limitations of the PAIR model suggest the need for the development of collaborative opportunities in which artists do more than just use the facilities. Similarly, the ground-breaking MIT Media Laboratory is a model worthy of further description. progenitor of university-based, interdisciplinary research centers, the Media Lab first explored the potential for industry sponsorship. An innovative intellectual property policy that allows all corporate sponsors to share in the Media Lab's developments encourages free sharing of ideas, and has the added benefit of insuring that no single sponsor can unduly influence research. Sponsors also provide outside field testing venues for the Media Lab's research projects, which are organized into three large areas: Digital Life, News in the Future and Things that Think. [5] But although the Media Lab and Xerox PARC present compelling paradigms for digital research, fundamental questions remain about how to attract the best people, how to enhance collaboration, how to create new relationships with corporate culture and how to extend the lessons from research institutions to broader education. Three new instituti ons--a public university in Canada, a research center in Sweden and a corporation in the United States--attempt to answer these questions. There seems to be plenty of funding available for new multidisciplinary media centers, but guaranteeing the future viability of collaborative research methods is a challenging proposition. …