A display at the exhibition. [Photo/en.xmu.edu.cn]
Students from Xiamen University's Institute of Creativity and Innovation explored new approaches to design through 74 imagined parallel worlds at the final exhibition of the Specialist Ways of Working (SWOW) course on June 1.
The visual communication design students created fictional worlds with their own rules, languages, and cultures to examine how design can reshape perceptions of reality.
SWOW, taught by Caleb Fahey, Ruehl Muller and Julian Stone, is a core course in the visual communication design major. The semester's theme was "Re-designing Reality". Rather than assigning conventional visual communication projects, students built complete virtual worlds from scratch, including their spaces, visual languages, writing systems, and everyday objects.
The course was divided into three rotating modules, "CARTOGRAPHY", "SEMIOGRAPHY", and "ETHNOGRAPHY".
In "CARTOGRAPHY", Fahey guided students to approach spatial design through human perception and behavior, using maps to represent data and experience.
Muller led "SEMIOGRAPHY", in which students developed language systems for their worlds, considering how writing systems are formed, written, and presented, and how language is used in everyday communication.
Stone's "ETHNOGRAPHY" asked students to imagine societies through an anthropological lens, exploring residents' lifestyles, everyday objects, and cultural relationships.
Students combined their research from the three modules and presented their worlds in exhibition spaces of less than two square meters. Models, lighting, and installations created different spatial experiences around themes including the future, memory, nature, and emotion.
Fahey said 75 percent of his assessment was based on students' research and practice logs rather than their final visual products. "Each student's work is developing an increasingly distinctive voice of its own," Fahey said.
Fahey guides students through their design projects. [Photo/en.xmu.edu.cn]
