A LIVING & LEARNING PROGRAM IN THE HONORS COLLEGE AT UMD
To say that we’re interdisciplinary may be quite an understatement. DCC students come from these following departments: American Studies, Aerospace Engineering, Agricultural and Veterinary Medicine, Animal Sciences, Architecture, Art History, Art Studio, Biochemistry, Bioengineering, Biology, Business (Undecided), Cell Biology and Genetics, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Economics, Education, Electrical Engineering, Engineering (Undecided), English Language and Literature, Fire Protection Engineering, Foreign Language Education, Government and Politics, History, Information Systems, Journalism, Letters and Sciences, Marketing, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Music Education, Music (Liberal Arts Program), Music (Professional Program), Physics, Physiology and Neurobiology, Psychology, Secondary Education, Sociology.
We are polyglots and speak 0101010, 1337, 8421-code, American Sign Language, Anime, Arabic, ASP.NET, BASIC, Bengali, Blazon, C, C#, C++, Cantonese Chinese, Chinese-Shanghai Dialect, CSS/CSS3, Dubstep, Ducreux Meme Speak, English (American), English (Broken), English (International), English (Internet), English (UK), Eye contact, Facial expression, French, German, Gibberish, Hausa, Hebrew (Biblical), Hebrew (Modern), Hindi, HSK (Humming and Screaming and Kicking), HTML/XHTML, IDL, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Japanese Internet-speak, Java, JavaScript/JQuery, Judeo-Aramaic, Kikamba, Korean, LaTeX, Latin, Lisp, LOGO, LOLCat speak, Love and rainbows and friendship, Mandarin Chinese, Math (it’s the language of the universe!), Mind reading, Music!, MySQL, Nerd, Objective-C, OCaml, Painting/Drawing, PHP, Pig Latin, Pirate, Pokemon, Portuguese, Python, Ruby (fortunately), Ruby (unfortunately), Russian, Spanglish, Spanish, Taiwanese, Telepathy, Thai, Turkish, Ubbi Dubbi, Urdu, Vietnamese, Visual Basic, XML, Y86, Yoruba, — — .-. … . / -.-. — -.. .
Design | Cultures + Creativity seeks self-motivated, independent thinkers and provides them with an intimate community of students in which to explore, innovate, and create. DCC students are exceptionally talented, multi-faceted students with interests as varied and diverse as our student population representing 35 academic majors across campus.
Each year, DCC admits approximately 70 high-achieving Honors students to join the program. While each of the students have very individualized experiences, many students share similar traits:
First-year applicants to the University of Maryland who demonstrate exceptional academic ability and promise are automatically considered for admission to the Honors College and to DCC when they apply by the preferred November 1 deadline. There is no separate addendum or special application at that time. Once a student is admitted to the Honors College, invitations will be extended to join DCC. For more information on the Honors College timelines please visit the Honors College website.
– Self-motivated, independent thinkers.
– A broad range of interests and activities.
– Leadership and cooperation.
– An openness to new ideas.
– Motivated to learn through experience.
– Engagement with the broader community.
Through this program, the curriculum doesn’t end as you walk outside the classroom. The talent within DCC’s students encourages constant learning and brainstorming. I became so close with my peers in the Beta class because we not only learned together, but we also grew together. DCC really breaks down the barriers associated with tech and allows anyone to learn and develop useful digital skills. In DCC, I challenged myself to work with the CS majors, learn Photoshop and HTML. By doing that, I strengthened my Economics major in away that no other program could have done.Lilybelle Davis, Economics major
DCC is unlike most other honors programs. The program can really take any form we want it to. The professors and assistants teach us about technology, computers, and the Internet; and then they teach us about digital art and creative expression. We have open-ended projects wherein we can take any idea we have and develop it, as long as we commit to giving it the attention and time it deserves. Thanks to DCC and some of my classes the past few years, I have also really developed an interest in multimedia production. I like taking and editing photos, as well as producing short videos and audio clips. I’ve even gotten into website design and development. For current and potential DCC students, my advice is to be creative. Take a leap. If there is anything you’ve always wanted to do — DO IT. DCC provides the resources and support to make that happen.Alexis Anthony, Public Relations major
DCC is a smorgasbord of multidisciplinary majors. It works because it integrates each major’s strengths to form strong collaborative projects and thinking beyond the realm of just a major or discipline of study. It truly examines the potential of digital technology in all future areas of study — from computer science to business and marketing to graphic design to English to math. I picked it to understand the intersections of technology with journalism, and it has helped me understand the potential of digital impact on the media world. Bringing together such a diversity of majors and backgrounds, DCC becomes a family of support, always helpful and always interested to further our understanding of the digital world. My favorite moment in DCC was completing my capstone project. My capstone was a challenge for me to write 100 stories on race, religion, happiness and politics in a semester using multimedia elements. It was all hosted on my blog, 1story100ways.wordpress.com. I did dozens of interviews and pulled from many different sources in an attempt to tell a slice of the many narratives surrounding those four topics.Beena Raghavendran, Journalism and Government & Politics double major
DCC is a diverse program that fundamentally challenges the modern definition of technology. DCC looks to stretch your mental confinements on the uses of technology and social media by introducing foreign projects and assignments with technology. For example, creating grids of surveillance cameras, developing and tweeting with a certain hashtag for educational/classroom purposes. My favorite moment in DCC was being able to share and listen to other student’s mixes of the same 20-30 samples in our digital sounds class. The ability to create such dynamic beats from ordinary noises first introduced me to the joy of using audio software to enhance and recreate sounds, especially in musical context. For current and future students, enjoy your time around some of the most creative and imaginative faculty, students, and curriculum on campus. It is very different from the majority of other programs on campus.Bryant O’Brien, Information Systems major
DCC aims to cultivate life long learners and critically engaged thinkers who will become the makers and doers of tomorrow, able to expand our notions of human potential; not merely technologically but also socially and creatively.
Your support can help us further achieve these goals. The DCC program welcomes monetary and in-kind donations to support the overall mission and its students.
Students work closely with faculty and graduate assistants in DCC. Most class sizes are under 18 students and we draw on the expertise of faculty from all across the university.
Director
Jason Farman is the Director of the Design | Cultures + Creativity Program, an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, and a faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of the book Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (Routledge, 2012 — winner of the 2012 Book of the Year Award from the Association of Internet Researchers) and an edited collection titled The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies (Routledge Press, 2014).
Associate Director
Krista Caballero is the Associate Director of DCC. As a new media artist and sculptor, her work unpacks cultural myths relating to the “American” West, technology, gendered land use, and ideas of the sublime. Her current project, Mapping Meaning, provides a forum for artists, scientists and scholars to engage topics of the environment through interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University and has exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Graduate Assistant
Jarah Moesch is a Graduate Assistant for DCC. She is a digital media and performance artist activist whose current research and creative practice investigates and disrupts concepts of normativity in public spaces. Her work lies at the intersection of gender performance, queerness and everyday life. She has an MFA in Integrated Media Art from Hunter College and is currently a PhD student in American Studies. Prior to returning to school, she taught media theory and practice at Hunter College for a number of years. Jarah’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums, galleries and festivals. She can be found at The Jarah Tree, or on Twitter @jarahmoesch, and she blogs at HASTAC, where she is currently a scholar.
Graduate Assistant
Joseph Meyer is a Graduate Assistant for DCC. He is pursuing a PhD in American Studies. He holds a BA in American Studies and History from California State University, Fullerton, and an MA in American Studies also from CSUF. He previously worked as an Editorial Assistant for American Quarterly. His research interests are broadly based around the internet in general, but specifically upon how communities are formed within a digital space and how those communities impact formations of identity.
Graduate Assistant
Shiva Prakash is a graduate student pursuing his masters in Telecommunications Engineering (ENTS) at UMD. He holds a bachelor of technology degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. He has been a core team member and an active volunteer at Swecha, an organization that is committed to promoting the use of free and open source software in India. As a part of Swecha, he has delivered sessions to over 2000 engineering undergraduates across various cities, involving them into learning new technology and putting this technology into practice in order to solve hurdles that communities in India face. He has always loved the idea of making things simpler and making people understand the beauty behind everything they learn.
Distinguished Faculty Fellow
Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, transport, borders, and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, The Hermitage, and at the Venice Biennale. Elahi was recently invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, World Economic Forum, at TED Global, among others. See his interview on The Colbert Report.
Core Faculty
Evan Golub, Ph.D. is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and an Assistant Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. His research interests include children and technology, educational classroom technologies, ubiquitous computing, and creativity support tools. He has co-authored a textbook on Information Technology, and authored a Visual C++ workbook and Student Response System faculty guidebook, and is an avid photographer.
Core Faculty
Alexis Lothian is an interdisciplinary scholar of queer and feminist media and cultural studies with a focus on speculative fiction, digital media, and online fandom. She is a tenure track Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at University of Maryland College Park, where she teaches in the LGBT Studies program and the undergraduate honors program, Design | Culture and Creativity. She is presently developing a book manuscript based on her PhD dissertation, “Deviant Futures: Queer Temporality and the Cultural Politics of Science Fiction,” while also working on what will become a second monograph on critical and social justice-oriented fan cultures and participating in collaborative work as part of the TransformDH collective.
Core Faculty
Michelle Butler is a faculty member in the iSchool at the University of Maryland and a core faculty member with DCC. Her areas of academic interest are in Tolkien or medieval literature and history. Her my current research is on memes as literary criticism. Ephemera, whatever the century, is of interests to her work. Her dissertation research focused on direct address in medieval and early modern drama, and she has published articles in that area.
For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. Paulo Freire
At DCC we believe that digital culture is based fundamentally upon the process of collaborating, sharing, building and learning together. As a mentor you will have the opportunity to gain leadership skills and teaching experience while contributing to the development of anothers educational and personal growth. Plus, it will be fun! You will be introduced to really great people.
Along with DCC faculty, mentors plan activities that are both educational and social in nature. These are based upon individual and group interests.
The Mentorship program is a yearlong commitment and meets once a month on Saturday afternoons.
The DCC Lab is run by a set of committed students that make ensure that the equipment available is well taken care of and accounted for. A lab manager is always present during the lab hours to check out equipment, provide operation instructions, and have fun with their fellow DCCers!
Lab Manager
Angela is a sophomore Mathematics and Computer Science double major. She is part of club tennis and Pi Mu Epsilon, the math honors society on campus. She is also a math tutor through UMD’s Noyce Tutoring Program for the local high school, Northwestern. Angela is not sure what she wants to do in the future, but is interested in algorithms and social media because of her love of YouTube. So if you want to talk YouTube, come see her!
Lab Manager
Apart from being a lab manager, Lock is on the Maryland Club Swim Team, and enjoys spending time outdoors. She is a Neurobiology and Physiology major, and hopes to become a doctor one day and work with the organization Doctors without Borders. Besides athletics and school, Lock enjoys volunteering with organizations like Keen and El Hogar Ministries, an orphanage system in Honduras.
Lab Manager
Christopher Bugtong is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has a radio show at the campus station, WMUC, and loves to listen to and talk about music. He is also the Director of Public Relations for the Filipino Cultural Association. If you ever want to talk about music, art, film, or anything else that’s cool, Chris would love to talk with you while he works in the DCC Lab.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Emma is a sophomore at the University of Maryland. She majors in architecture and loves the creative aspect of DCC. She also minors in Project Management, and interned at an architecture firm over the summer. As an active member of the architecture fraternity on campus, she can’t wait to get involved in studio. Outside of class, Emma participates in an a cappella group called Pandemonium where she has made some of her closest friends besides those from within DCC. She’d love visitors to stop by while she sits patiently in the lab.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Jamie is a sophomore journalism major at UMD. She has a passion for fitness and nutrition, which means she spends a lot of time at the gym. She loves Maryland, as she has lived about 30 minutes away from campus her whole life. Jamie wants to be involved with video production as a career. She currently works for BTN2GO, the Big Ten Network’s live online streaming service.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Joshua Hall is a pleasant man. He is currently studying Broadcast Journalism, and enjoys working with video production. He doesn’t have free time.
The goal of the Student Council is to arrange fun events and promote community within the DCC group. We are looking forward to the the upcoming semester and the 2014-2015 academic year. If you have any questions send them an email at dccstudentcouncil@gmail.com.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Emma is a sophomore at the University of Maryland. She majors in architecture and loves the creative aspect of DCC. She also minors in Project Management, and interned at an architecture firm over the summer. As an active member of the architecture fraternity on campus, she can’t wait to get involved in studio. Outside of class, Emma participates in an a cappella group called Pandemonium where she has made some of her closest friends besides those from within DCC. She’d love visitors to stop by while she sits patiently in the lab.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Jamie is a sophomore journalism major at UMD. She has a passion for fitness and nutrition, which means she spends a lot of time at the gym. She loves Maryland, as she has lived about 30 minutes away from campus her whole life. Jamie wants to be involved with video production as a career. She currently works for BTN2GO, the Big Ten Network’s live online streaming service.
Lab Manager/Student Council
Joshua Hall is a pleasant man. He is currently studying Broadcast Journalism, and enjoys working with video production. He doesn’t have free time.
Student Council
Matt is a sophomore computer engineering major, who is also studying Japanese and music theory on the side. He enjoys writing music, playing the piano, building small electronics, and drawing, though his other hobbies include table tennis, badminton, Rubik’s cubing, and climbing buildings. He doesn’t have free time, as any free time is spent sleeping.
Student Council
I am a freshman going into Electrical Engineering. I was born in Texas, and have also lived in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I greatly enjoy building computers and programming. Before coming to UMD, I had been a soccer referee for about 6 years. Over the summer, I taught chess to children at the local library.
Design | Cultures + Creativity is a 2 year, 16 credit program. There are four DCC specific courses students must take (one each semester) beginning with a broad overview of how technology and society influence one another in the first semester and culminating in a capstone project of the students choosing at the conclusion of the program. Students are also required to take 2 Honors Seminars of their choosing during their 2 years in DCC as well as participate in a variety of workshops, lectures, film screenings, or working groups. Below is a brief overview of the courses.
This required introduction to the Design | Cultures + Creativity program will examine the history of creative digital expression from the invention of computers in the mid-20th century through the Web 2.0 landscape of today (and beyond). This is part one of a two-course sequence that will be completed by all DCC students during their first year. You will learn to use new media technologies, explore the cultural context in which they were first imagined, and explore examples of creative works that exploit the unique opportunities the digital medium offers. Historical and theoretical insights will be applied by actively considering issues of ethics, aesthetics, and community as they are manifest in the contemporary globalized cultures of the Web, including popular social networking sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, virtual worlds such as Second Life, computer games,and online reference tools such as Wikipedia. This will be coupled with a practicalintroduction – also to be continued in the second semester – to developing new toolsand applications for platforms such as PCs or phones or tablet computers. This team-taught course is therefore aggressively interdisciplinary, coupling hands-onexperimentation with a curriculum designed to focus awareness on the historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts in which digital creativity happens
The course syllabus can be found here.
Information technologies have woven themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives, so much that we often call our digital era the “Information Age.” While the concept of “information” has been around for millennia, there are profound shifts happening in the ways we think about and practice information in our digital society. In this course, we begin by defining the “Information Age” in a historical context to then analyze the shifting concept of “facts” with the rise of big data. Throughout the course, we will look at the impacts of particular modes of information exchange on issues of identity, community, and our interactions with the world. Using examples such as the exponential growth of Facebook, anonymity and “catfishing,” the inequalities of access and uses of digital media, we will explore the ways that certain practices with digital media are encouraged, promoted, or taken as commonsense. We will then look at the material nature of these digital technologies, analyzing topics such as the physicality of the internet, how the design metaphors of these media impact the ways we think about our world, the causes and results of peer-to-peer file sharing. We conclude the course by looking at the connection between our everyday physical spaces and the emergence of ubiquitous/mobile computing that now give these spaces new meaning and context.
Professor: Evan Golub, Computer Science and HCIL
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2013/hdcc208f/syllabus.pdf
The field of Human-Computer Interaction draws in researchers from many disciplines. Here at Maryland, our HCI Lab has had faculty and students from departments including Computer Science, Psychology, the iSchool, Journalism, Sociology, Business, and English. Individual project teams tend to have similar combinations of disciplines represented. These teams also work with “end users” who come from diverse populations such as medical doctors, children, older adults, and others. How does such a diverse group work together when designing new technologies for and with the people for whom the technologies are being built? If your core group is more science and engineering focused, how do you bring diverse viewpoints into a team’s work? This course will explore and answer questions such as these!
We will explore the idea that to create a good and useful tool, you need to understand the people who will come to use it, and the tasks they want to accomplish with it. We will see that a cross-disciplinary team works best when each member contributes their unique view and skills to the whole. We will also see that to make a creation usable, you need to learn what mistakes might be common and then design to avoid them from happening. You will develop an understanding of these through the course readings, lectures, exercises, discussions, and projects.
Professor: Krista Caballero, Design | Cultures + Creativity
With rapidly evolving digital technologies the film industry is being transformed. Smart phones, motion capture, 3D as well as the proliferation of web series, and ‘appisodes’ are changing how we look at, create and experience movies and television. This seminar will explore the theory and practice of how these new technologies are expanding boundaries of the moving image and how this is reflected in society. In addition, through hands-on, experimental and collaborative projects, the course will include a practical introduction to video production and editing.
As a class we will critically screen and discuss “movies and art of influence.” Experimental film, web series, video art, and installation will be considered in tandem with more traditional forms of narrative and documentary cinema. While not a historical survey or a traditional film appreciation course, key films and videos have been selected that serve as an introduction to major themes within cinema. The first half of the semester will focus on notions of “expanding perspectives” considering topics related to authorship, truth, identity and politics. The second half will be dedicated to “expanding screens” or how artists and filmmakers are experimenting with new models of dissemination, participation and installation.
Professor: Michelle Butler, iSchool
In the Middle Ages, a well stocked personal library would contain twenty or thirty volumes. Now the internet has made access to information fast and easy, and the scope of information available is staggering. With a simple series of key stokes we can call up a wide range of information about any subject we like. The Middle Ages, for instance. Web sources allow us to quickly locate information about medieval literature, history, and culture. The possibilities seem endless. But are they?
In this course we will interrogate the potentials as well as the limitations of text-based learning, both web-sourced and via traditional books, through the lens of medieval literature, history, and culture. We can learn a great deal from web sources – when we can trust them. How do we determine whether a web search yields reliable information? What aspects of medieval culture can we grasp sufficiently through digital and print sources, and which elements are enhanced through experiential, material methods? We will read medieval literature such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, learn about medieval history through both primary and secondary sources, and experience medieval culture through food, clothing, language, and objects.
In small, seminar-sized groups, students will meet regularly with a project advisor in a research practicum that culminates in a research project or major creative effort. Multiple seminar offerings will be available.
In addition to the 4 DCC specific courses, students are required to take two Honors Seminars on a any of the topics offered with the HONR prefix. A list of the classes available through the Honors College can be found here.
The DCC Capstone Project is the culmination of 2 years of work in DCC. Students will spend the Spring Semester of their second year working on a project of their design that engages with DCC’s curriculum, challenging students to think outside disciplinary boundaries, take creative risks, and approach problems from multiple perspectives. This project begins in the fall with students creating a proposal of their project similar to any proposal that they would write for a professional research grant they may apply for in the future. The template can be downloaded through this link: Capstone Proposal Template (.docx)
Our students have interned at some amazing places, including:
