Educational Innovation: An Investigation into Aesthetic Computing within the Digital Arts and Sciences Curricula

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract 0119532 Paul Fishwick University of Florida Title: An Investigation into Aesthetic Computing Within the Digital Arts and Sciences Curricula This project integrates research in "aesthetic computing" directly into a new set of CISE programs, collectively called Digital Arts and Sciences (DAS). The thrust of DAS is to create a student who is endowed with a hybrid-knowledge of computer engineering and the arts. This enables the student to work effectively in production-oriented teams centered on projects involving videos, interactive games, education, scientific and engineering visualization, and software engineering. The research integration is accomplished through the addition of an Aesthetic Computing course and a series of Digital World Production Studio courses. Both Fine Arts as well as CISE students take these courses, and the PIs team-teach the studio course. Aesthetic Computing refers to the use of genres and styles in fine art employed as metaphors for formal and diagrammatically rendered model structures commonly found in computing, such as automata, data flow graphs, data models and the comprehensive Unified Modeling Language (UML). This work builds upon many areas outside of CS such as semiotics, linguistics, analogy, metaphor, and the arts. Ongoing progress in the information and program visualization literature is most related; however, the project's focus is on a stronger arts component that both personalizes and enriches the user's modeling interface. For example, the representation of a finite state machine may be crafted, through metaphor mapping, to a scale or virtual model of a building. The style of the building can be taken from the huge variety of possible genres existing in architecture, without limiting the representation to abstract entities. And, elements of music and story schemata can be simultaneously mapped onto the architecture, further personalizing the interface. The goal of the project is to develop practitioners who understand both the formalisms of visualization and the practical aspects of human communication that deal with aesthetic interpretation.