A project by Javier Lopez with students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), presented in Ellen Lupton’s book Type on Screen (2014). In French:
Ce projet (…) a permis aux étudiants de concevoir des prototypes d’application météo. Outre la création d’une famille d’icônes représentant les différentes conditions météorologiques, les étudiants ont produit des mises en page pour la journée ou la semaine.
A project by Kristian Bjørnard with students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), presented in Ellen Lupton’s book Type on Screen (2014). In French:
Bjørnard a demandé aux étudiants de créer une affiche uniquement en langage HTML, CSS, avec un peu de JavaScript. (…) Certains étudiants ont choisi de rendre hommage à l’histoire du design, en recréant des compositions célèves de l’histoire des médias imprimés dans le cadre limité du web.
An assignment in User Interface Design, by Prof. Claudia Jacques, at Bronx Community College.
Identify what is bad interface design, navigation, functionality, interactivity, content distribution in a website or app and find a positive solution to that site.
Source: http://bccart87.claudiajacques.com/project-1-worst-of-the-web/
A brief created in January 2018 by John Maeda, then Head of Design at Automattic, for members of the design team:
“Our task was to pick one of our fellow designers’ blog posts and come up with a plan to get it over 1,000 views on a financial budget of $20 and a time budget of two hours.”
Read more on the Automattic Design Blog.
An evaluation of the results was written by professional blogger Kitty Lusby.
Some context on the rationale of the exercise:
The design teams at Automattic like to do periodic exercises called Empathy Challenges. The goal in these exercises is to get us thinking in our customers’ shoes, to understand their contexts and challenges.
Thomas Bishop
An assignment by Kenneth Goldsmith, at University of Pennsylvania:
One class assignment asks students to retype five pages of content of their choice. Students who type out everything from restaurant menus to presidential speeches often find the assignment relaxing, Goldsmith said. It’s the first time they can just focus on the act of typing, instead of struggling to argue a thesis or create an original piece of work, he added.
The Daily Pensylvanian, 2011
Goldsmith writes about it:
Others say that it was the most intense reading experience they ever had, with many actually embodying the characters they were retyping. Several students become aware that the act of typing or writing is actually an act of performance, involving their whole body in a physically durational act (even down to noticing the cramps in their hands). Some of the students become intensely aware of the text’s formal properties and for the first time in their lives began to think of texts not only as transparent, but as opaque objects to be moved around a white space.
An assignment created by teachers Jamie Wilkinson, Evan Roth and James Powderly, at Parsons (The New School for Design). It was carried out in 2007 and 2008.
This course is dedicated to learning how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online. We study the art and science of getting hits. And in an academic first, students’ grades will be awarded by a piece of software that helps students track their websites & online accounts and monitor their popularity in real-time.
Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati, Alexa, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more will be mined for data relevant to the amount of attention a student is receiving, such as view counts, friend counts, inbound blog links, the length and intelligence level of comments, and more. This raw data is calculated into a “Famo Index Score” that will be mapped onto the Parsons Graduate Grade Scale Description, and each student given a grade from an A to an F.
Dedicated website (Archive) : https://web.archive.org/web/20111103100655/http://internetfamo.us/class/about
Coverage:
In this assignment, students are asked to create a “Font Collection”: a selection of typefaces related through some concept.
I carried out this assignment during an afternoon (3 hours) in November 2016, at Eracom, Lausanne.
The original project brief can be found here (in French). In short:
Concrètement, chaque groupe aura comme mission de:
The results are presented on this site: https://eracom-gr451.github.io/font-collections/
The students are requested to create “stock photography” of some topic – for instance, their city. They will create lots of photographs (maybe also video) of different key locations, and publish them online, on stock photography platforms.
The produced content can serve as base material for further briefs, becoming part of the schools photography database. This will raise questions of how to manage, to share and to classify such a database.
An assignment by Marc Weidenbaum, posted on Disquiet in 2017:
The participants will collectively create a continuous 24-hour video recording. This recording will be a “time capsule” documenting a day and night in their chosen surrounding (city). The video should ideally never cut. It should be a nearly continuous stream. The participants will have to:
Background: the idea for this brief comes from an audio project I did in 2002, when I produced a 24-hour audio recording, using two minidisk recorders. Nearly 20 years later, such a project can be done in video!
Equipment: the best currently available technology for immersive video recording should be used. In 2020, this is probably “360 degree video”. An interesting option would be the Insta360 One X, a standalone 360 camera, selling for $400 USD. The storage capacity needed, if filming at 4K@30fps resolution, according to camera specs, would be 615 GB – that’s 3 x 256GB SD cards, selling currently for ca $75 (for example SanDisk 256GB Extreme PRO).