Digital Studio Lab: A Cross-disciplinary Collaboration between the Humanities Department and The Canino School of Engineering Technology

Abstract

"The Digital Studio Lab at Canton is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Humanities Department and The Canino School of Engineering Technology that proposes to reconnect humanistic critical thinking, narrative writing, and deep analysis with Engineering’s strengths in problem-solving, digital coding, and graphics skills. By working collaboratively across the arts and sciences, the Digital Studio Lab promises to provide students with experiences and skills that will make them more marketable for practical employment in digital industries such as information design, video game development, digital storytelling, narrative/graphic medicine, web design, multimodal writing, online journalism and so forth.

Our project consists of 1) a pedagogy and 2) a digital studio space. First, this project reimagines traditional pedagogical methods that emerge from seminar (lecture), lab (technical design), and studio (artistic practice) to teach majors in English/Technological Communications, Game Design, Engineering, and Graphic Multimedia Design via a cooperative, maker-based pedagogy that aims to solve local and global problems through media projects. Second, the digital studio space facilitates student collaboration within a non-hierarchical, flexible studio-lab space that includes moveable furniture for student collaboration, writable wall spaces, projectors for coding and story display, and lecture capture software for assessment and research purposes that will lead to published scholarship and new pedagogical practices."