This is a course that explore narrativity as it relates to design.  Especially important to our dialog is the concept of story archetypes and how those archetypes are present in cinema, novel, comic book, short story, interactive experience, game, and designed artifact.

We will discuss the narrative in the context of semiotics, and will learn how to decode layers of meaning in visual and written texts.

Goals

Learn how to use narrative as a part of visual and interactive solutions.

• Story Archetypes
• Formal relationships
• Understanding of memory and the relationship to experience
• Analysis of other visual and graphic narratives.

Achieve beginning competency in media derivation tools and techniques for video, sound and scripted interactivity; master the lexicon of terms surrounding digitally-based media.

Objectives

• To use time, form, motion and narrative to successfully communicate in a simple interactive experience
• To develop a broad-based awareness and understanding of archetypal story-forms and their use in design
• To gain a clear understanding of reading and writing visual rhetoric in linear and non-linear time-based structures

Course Wiki

Share code and resources, create pages, and author content on the course wiki

Required Texts

Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
ISBN: 0-06-097625-X

The Elements of Style Illustrated (Hardcover)
by William Strunk Jr. (Author), E.B. White (Author), Maira Kalman (Illustrator)
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; Ill edition (October 20, 2005)
ISBN: 1-59-420069-6

Six Memos for the Next Millennium
by Italo Calvino
ISBN: 0-679-74237-9 

Books & Articles on Reserve

• The Film Sense, Sergei Eisenstein
• Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel
• The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Brenda Laurel, ed.
• Art as Experience, John Dewey
• Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan

Prerequisites

Foundation program prerequisites are mandatory as are Art 2225 Typography I and Art 3623 Identity & Systems Design. Students must possess a comprehensive working knowledge of  InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and other software deemed appropriate for project development.  Any new media software knowledge is advantageous.