Media Design Practices

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We are a community that authors design!

Students

Our students come to us from the worlds of interaction design, product design, fine arts, film, liberal arts, computer science, architecture, engineering, and more.

Faculty

MDP faculty harken from the fields of media design, anthropology, art, film, architecture, cultural theory, computer science, interaction design, product design, robotics, cultural analytics, and more.

Alumni

Our graduates have the agility and skills to bring design to diverse situations. Learn what they are up to now.

Life at MDP

Join MDP tonight - Thursday, December 17 @4pm PT f

Join MDP tonight - Thursday, December 17 @4pm PT for MDP's end of term Thesis Work-in-Progress Show! Find us in second life - map link below! The Fall term has offered new design challenges as MDP worked remotely… faculty and students have met those and continued to lead in dynamic ways of making and thinking in design / technology projects! Second life map: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/MDP/111/161/27

Join us tomorrow for the #thesis WIP show to talk

Join us tomorrow for the #thesis WIP show to talk about student work, share a beverage over zoom and celebrate the #thesis milestone. Stay tuned for the link. See you there! #ohmdp

Next week is our big Critical Positions Thesis Rev

Next week is our big Critical Positions Thesis Review! We can’t do our usual pizza and beer in the gallery following the review, but we’ll be having a live event Thursday night to drink over zoom, talk about the work and celebrate our students! Stay tuned for more details on how to access the student work and join this WIP show! #ohmdp

It’s starting to feel a lot like...CRIT WEEK! 🎄Week 13 is looking a bit different this year, but the scrambling and the excitement is still the same. This piece is completed by @mayacfriedman for her #thesis review, where she’ll be presenting a fictional clothing line of protective gear for women who work amongst occupational hazards and experience severe gynecological issues. The piece was done in collaboration with the wonderful @sara.nahk ! More information coming later this week on how to attend the reviews and see all the students’ works. #thesistears #ohmdp

Repost from @ucsdvisarts • This Saturday, 9am PS

Repost from @ucsdvisarts • This Saturday, 9am PST. “Pohflepp in Practice. Revisiting the work and world of artist & designer Sascha Pohflepp, a close friend of @mediadesignpractices! Join online: https://postrational.foundation Amidst volcano warp zones and hybrid life forms, in an online world designed for the event, Pohflepp in Practice will bring together collaborators and friends to celebrate and reflect on the practice and process of Sascha Pohflepp, who passed away unexpectedly in 2019. A PhD student in the Department of Visual Arts, he called Southern California and Berlin home. @plugimi w/ @chriswoebken @bratton @alexandradaisy @3LVVIA @hxrts @susanploetz @leyink @matthewjlutz and many more cohosted by @HKW_Berlin @eyebeamnyc @trust_support #ucsdvisualarts #ucsdartphd #saschapohflepp #postrationalfoundation

Not to miss event: We are in the muck. Today’s u

Not to miss event: We are in the muck. Today’s ultra-digitized, stuff-saturated world is exhilarating and exhausting. Media inputs and outputs result in a web of ontological connections so dense that we have become fully and inescapably enveloped in them. To free ourselves we must revel in everything and everything, from ecological systems to their technological doppelgangers, the material to the ineffable, the natural world to the human to the post-human. Or, to steal a term from Donna Hararway, composthuman. Mashed, Meme’d, Mixed, and Mulched celebrates practices that take refuge in this mess, that showcase the very nature of its messiness, and reject traditional, humanistic impulses to tidy up, problem solve, or conquer. RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/19P9CiW8aCeSThfObQa-yhzep8kkh0gYqEktbegb-EhM/viewform?edit_requested=true Event will feature @laurenmetropolis, @free.the.land, @lucymcrae and @revolutionordeath. Curated by @mimizeiger and students @wellchen, @andoncemore, @bobos.mommy and @karinajhernan. Moderated by @milkncookys, @blakeshaekos, @kateladenheim and Christie Wu!

It’s tough to start a new degree remotely, but o

It’s tough to start a new degree remotely, but our #dev students are still finding a way to produce unique work. See me, Hear me is a system drawing project for @timdurfee’s class by @1fffff0 that aims to analyze the human speech system and map out the relationship between human perception of speech contents, tones, and gestures. “Here I put the human perception at the center and focused my design research on how tones and gestures perform together to amplify the speech information and let the messages transmit inward to people.” How to read: The background sound simulates a mixed sound state of the speech and human perception. The size of red dots illustrate the tones of the words, black dots represent the points when gestures come in and the linking lines show the strength of the perception.

We’re nearing the end of week 10! Capping off th

We’re nearing the end of week 10! Capping off the week with a quick share of artifacts emerging from @rrose.water’s thesis, based on questions around how humans, the built environment and the wilderness can coexist. 🌲

@milkncookys’s final takeover! Image 1: A tex

@milkncookys’s final takeover! Image 1: A text I recently read called “Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology, and Indegenous Knowledge” by Elizabeth Tunstall. I am interested in the process and study of anthropology in the context of design. Image 2: A map of my daily routine at home. During the pandemic we have been forced to keep our distance from the outside world so it was interesting to track my daily route inside my apartment. For the second part of this assignment I chose to make a collage of images I collected last year on my trip to Oaxaca, Washington, and Oregon when travel was a bit easier to do before the pandemic. Image 3: A prototype for a rock city I imagined on a hike in Joshua Tree. We were assigned to reimagine a city in Grad Lab, and I chose to study organic shapes as a stand in for modern architecture.