DES 2600 Digital 3D and Time-Based Media

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  DES 2600 Digital 3D and Time-Based Media
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open-source 3D design software, Blender, is being utilized in a 3D design course for undergraduate students by Rob Ray at CSU, San Bernardino. Blender is the free and open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The main motivation to adopt an open-source software program was to provide students with an industry-ready, no-cost solution they could grow with over their career. Most students access Blender by downloading and the application on their Mac or PC laptops and desktop computers.

DES 2600 - Digital 3D and Time-Based Media
Brief Description of course highlights:  DES 2600 is required course for design majors. Prerequisite courses include DES 1100 Digital Applications Basics, DES 1110 Fundamental Design Principles, and DES 1125 Design Thinking.

Student population:  BA in Design Studies and BFA in Design majors are the most common students in the course. This course is often a student’s first introduction to digital 3D design.

Learning or student outcomes:  

CLO 1: Outline the structure of 3D content creation workflows
CLO 2: Interpret a creative brief and deliver a 3D solution.
CLO 3: Discover histories of 3D computing and modeling.
CLO 4: Generate ideas, sketches, prototypes, that culminate in refined completed digital 3D assets for motion graphics, gaming, and extended reality experiences.
CLO 5: Understand how digital 3D assets are used in advertising, entertainment, art, communications, and product design industries.
CLO 6: Participate in-person design criticism sessions as a generative feedback approach.
CLO 7: Speak clearly and engage a diverse student population during in-class discussions (both through small group activity and in lecture/discussion).
CLO 8: Understand how digital platforms exacerbate past and current social justice and equity issues and also create new issues.

Key challenges faced and how resolved: Surprisingly, I experienced very few challenges. Blender is widely used in industry so there are many excellent resources online that helped me think about how to structure the course. Blender did recently undergo a user interface redesign so this forced me to seek out only the most recent teaching materials that showcase the new interface.

Blender https://www.blender.org/

Brief Description: Blender is an open-source 3D creation tool that includes features for modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Authors:  Blender is developed by a team of full-time and part-time Blender Foundation employees along with Blender Release Contributors and the Blender Community

Student access:  Blender can be downloaded at https://blender.org

Supplemental resources: Blender tutorials are available at https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/

Cost Savings:  Commercial 3D development software costs $35 to $225 per month.

License:  GPL license

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. During my new professor orientation, I learned about and became inspired by CSUSB’s affordable learning solutions efforts. Most students taking the DES 2600 course have had no experience using digital 3D tools. I decided Blender would achieve the course learning objectives and be a no-cost platform for students available to them at any point along their learning path toward their design degree and beyond. Open-source tools like Blender permit students to continue their learning and skills development after graduation without incurring steep software licensing expenses. This ready availability of a no-cost sophisticated 3D design creation suite for our students feels essential. Digital 3D design tools are sophisticated software applications created for niche customer bases. This combination of sophistication and niche bases has created a software ecosystem with prohibitively expensive licensing fees for students on their journey to design professionalism. These fees are particularly challenging when transitioning out of the university into internships, entry-level positions, and graduate programs. Early familiarity and learning with an open-source tool give our students an affordable way to turn their ideas into prototypes and products.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? I consulted professors at other colleges, specifically, Taylor Hokanson, Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Columbia College Chicago.

Sharing Best Practices: I can’t think of any! Just go for it!

Rob Ray 
Associate Professor of Design (UI, UX, Extended Realities)
California State University, San Bernardino 

https://www.csusb.edu/profile/rob.rayPlease provide a link to your university page.Please describe the courses you teach.

I continually consider how my student-centered teaching practices overlap with my research practices as a human-centered designer. In human-centered design (HCD), empathy is the first phase of a designer's work when engaging a new collaborator or starting a new project. We foreground collaboration with the problem owner when working with them to solve their problem. Empathy work is the designer's effort to understand the world with their collaborator's acuities and attempt to experience the world as they do. Empathy work is essential to the designer as it reminds us that we are not trying to solve our problems. We are trying to solve their problems. To empathize is to situate ourselves outside of ourselves to destabilize our preconceptions and make space for the thinking, curiosities, and pains of our non-designer collaborators. We also make efforts to share this empathy work with our non-designer collaborators as part of this process. We let them know we are trying, even when we aren't getting it entirely right.

In Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, they assert that teaching is the work of pointing students toward an anthropological mode of thinking that "allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it." As students become more capable of subverting their socio-cultural framing, they become more comfortable with curiosity, more adept at experimentation, and more freely able to connect ideas that previously seemed disparate. The work of teaching, then, is growing a student's comfort and courage to subvert.

 
It is a joy to continue working on these tasks simultaneously as a design educator. I enjoy thinking of the designer's empathy and the teacher's subversion as kindred self-escape efforts that share the goal of disallowing preconceptions and permitting the curiosity and courage to find new excitements, comprehensions, and discoveries. I relish the moments when my design and pedagogical practices blur into one another in this way. It is also a delight to see my students discover similar connections between their design and learning proficiencies. 

Courses I Teach

DES 1125 Design Thinking
DES 2600 Digital 3D and Time-Based Media
DES 3715 User Interface and User Experience Design
DES 4610 Virtual Reality