CMU Spring 2023

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In my second semester at CMU School of Design (SOD), we worked on projects to develop skills across all three design tracks: products, communications, and environments. We enhanced our understanding of the broader impact of design in the world. Below are descriptions of each course, followed by some of the highlights from the semester.

Design Lab — This course introduces concepts and methods to familiarize students with a range of analog and digital modes of working across products, communications, and environments. We used desktop modeling and comping methods to familiarize ourselves with a range of basic materials to build confidence in using and manipulating material to represent ideas.

Collaborative Visualizing — This course introduces frameworks of notational, exploratory and explanatory sketching using collaborative methods and exercises to cooperatively communicate design ideas.

Design Studies: Futures — Futures frames design in a temporally-extended, systemic context. It offers essential perspectives, practices, and competencies that are increasingly called for as designers progress in their work and careers, and as the design field evolves to acknowledge its significant powers and responsibilities.

Design Studies: Experience — Experience explores how design touches peoples lives, and shapes their materials and nonmaterial worlds. Through a series of lectures, viewings, and class discussions, we tried to determine just what design is and what designers can do.

Introduction to Photo Design — Using a digital camera, students learn how to extend their seeing with the camera, both in the world and in a shooting studio. Through shooting assignments, we learned how to deconstruct image meaning and aesthetical choices, construction of photographic meaning and aesthetics, gained an understanding of color and how color delivers meaning, learned how a photographic studio works, proper digital photographic workflow and became familiar with contemporary trends in photography.

Introduction to Environmental Ideas — This seminar-style course introduces key methods and approaches for interdisciplinary inquiry within a framework of Environmental Humanities. I took part in informed discussions about ways of seeing, and creating interventions for environmental problems that are simultaneously social, political, and technical.

To get a behind-the-scenes look from my Design Lab course, view my blog posts at www.medium.com/@lpbarnes. The descriptions of CMU's BDes courses are viewable at design.cmu.edu/content/bachelor-design.

Here are all of my photographs taken for my assignments in my photography course this semester. Each project runs downwards starting at the top. From traditional product shots to portrait work to experimental physical representations of the climate crisis, I expanded my photography skills greatly through this course.

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This series of drawings were all collaborative, meaning 1/4 of the bottom four compositions were drawn by me, the other 3/4 having been drawn by my project partners. It was an exercise in drawing collaboratively, and I enjoyed the "space" theme our professors had us use greatly.

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This project was our final for our drawing class this semester. We were tasked with telling our life story in a large circular frame. I created a very mathematical concept of telling my life story through time viewed chronologically traveling clockwise around the circle. My life is split up into four categories: (1) Friends/Relationships/Love (2) Family/Parents (3) Passions/Goals (4) Humility/Maturity. Depending on how relevant to each year of my life I considered each of these four categories were, the greater percentage of the distance from the center of the circle to the edge that section reserved.

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Depicted here are a variety of hand-drawn studies of the human form completed as assignments. Studying the human form is incredibly important for design because all design is inherently human-centered.

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This project was a solo Adobe Illustrator vector composition, focusing on the Copperbelly Water Snake, an endangered snake species with a historical range in my home state of Illinois. Prior to this project, I hadn't worked with Adobe Illustrator much at all, and now it is one of my favorite programs to work with. I enjoyed working with a style of art that I never had previously, and often use Adobe Illustrator in my work now.

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This was a collaborative spatial redesign project. My team of 3 and I chose CMU's Fifth + Clyde Residence Hall lobby to redesign, appreciating its existing "campfire" aesthetic. We felt that the space achieved that aesthetic only somewhat, and experimented with a variety of redesigns of the space to make it more sociable and relaxing. My contributions included the starry lighting across the ceiling, the interactive live-edge touch table, and my favorite: an adjustable reading light attached to the back of the circular seats surrounding the fireplace that resemble marshmallows on a stick!

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