Aesthetics of Form and Experience

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 2 (Winter )

Course Coordinator and Team: Khushbu Dublish

Email of course coordinator: khushbu@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: None

Course Objectives/Description:

This course is designed as a theoretical and practice based course to understand and explore constituents of form and experience and their aesthetic qualities. The students will work with traditional and contemporary elements and principles of design and how these are used to create a rich user/public experience. The focus is more on a reflective zone along an interdisciplinary context which is necessary for the understanding of form and experience. These ideas would be discussed and explored in the context of interaction and possible interventions drawing from societal attitudes, behaviour patterns and exchange.

Course Outcomes:

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. Define and judge form and experience.
2. Integrate a set of skills, knowledge and critical understanding to articulate and visualize new forms.
3. Devise a proposal for a new design in response to a clearly stated brief for a certain experience.
4. Develop a language of form and experience design derived from multiple explorations.
5. Document multi-sensorial design situations using various media.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

• Basics of Design Fundamentals: Understanding the elements of design and representative techniques to depict tangible and intangible forms.
• Design Development: Colour as the main domain of study and how it can be used effectively for design.
• Laws of Visual Perception: Gestalt and Principles of Design being used to create visual and spatial experiences and understanding human behaviour.
• Environmental Study: Application of the pre-taught topics in a real life scenario at a macro and micro level to observe, analyze, record and identify elements in an environment.

Assessment Details with weights:

• Class assessments for each unit: 40%
• Online assessments for each unit: 30%
• Class participation and attendance: 10%
• End-semester jury: 20%

Reading List:

• Bourdieu, P 1993 The field of cultural production. Columbian University Press, New York
• Chomsky, N & E S Herman, 1988 Manufacturing Consent.
• Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
• Phillips, R. and Steiner, C. 1999 Art, Authenticity and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter, in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds Berkeley: University of California Press pp.3-20 CP
• Pinney, C, &Thomas, N. (eds.) 2001 Beyond aesthetics: art and the technologies of enchantment Oxford : Berg
• Rubin, William (ed.) 1984 Primitivism in 20th century art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
• Sontag S, 1977 On Photography. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
• Svasek, Maruska 2007 Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. London Pluto Press.
• Thomas, N. 1991 Entangled objects: exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific London: Harvard University Press
• Latour Bruno, A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design* meeting of the Design History Society- Falmouth, Cornwall, 3rd September 2008

Additional Reference: