Review /Preview  of Sping Monster Goals: Critical Thinking and Information Design

This course is basically about learning how to and/or practicing how to Critically Analyze and Create Complex Information. To make you a more cautious, informed, intelligent and objective consumer and creator of information.

Basic Concepts:

Monsters as Fictive Icons representing deep cultural concepts, values and fears.

Monsters as "Othering" as a basic, historical human trait of great significance (ie genocide, murder, rape, war...)

Basic Goals/Skills: Critical Thinking and Information Design/Creative Application (two sides of the same coin)

1) Critical Thinking/Critical Analysis and Evaluation -- to take complex, multi-layered, value and emotionally-laden information in a variety of media, understand what it means, how it means and why it carries that meaning, and whether the information/meaning is valid/invalid, true/false, well-designed/poorly-designed etc.

Critical Thinking Basic Method: Objectivity, Analysis, Evaluation thru Research and Testing (Empiricism)

Monsters and Critical Thinking: Understand a culture's monsters and you understand that culture's values and fears. Understand your own monsters and you understand your own values and fears.

2) Information Design -- Apply critical thinking skills to both analyzing and creating media in general: examination and application of design tools (images, icons, words, sounds, music...) to understand how perception and values are and can be transformed.

Media we'll critically analyze, evaluate and design/create: fiction, non-fiction expository essays, comix, film, arguments, propaganda, web-pages, presentations, lectures.

Information Design and Monsters: Critical thinking can also reveal how (the specific methods) artists, directors, web-designers, authors, marketers, politicians etc etc manipulate images, language, concepts etc. to create effective, frightening monsters. We can reveal how -- and how well -- our minds are being molded by those who create and sell us monsters.  Rhetoric, persuasion, cultural transmission, seduction.

Critical thinking can allow us to design our own monsters or our own messages effectively so we can dick with other people's consciousness as well. Woohoo!

3) The Other vs. Empathy  -- We will continue to examine these two extremes of the psychological/sociological spectrum. Both Frankenstein and Bladerunner explicitly explore these concepts in detail and their key role in forming both monsters and monstrosity.

4) The Cultural Lens -- This is my attempt to unify the course into a single, common Rubric.  Our goal is to examine how all cultures create and transmit values through iconic mythology, and to understand the underlying cultural processes behind this transmission.  We can use this in three related ways:

    4a) Understanding the symbol (myth, monster or hero, image, story, film etc.) helps explain the culture (Little Red Riding Hood example)

    4b) Understanding the culture helps explain the symbol (Little Red Riding Hood example)

    4c) Deconstructionism: The relationship between the myth and the culture -- the symbol and that which it symbolizes, the monster vs. the true threat, the mythological hero vs how people in that culture truly behave(d) etc. -- is rarely direct or "one to one", and often it is in fact antithetical; myths as often obscure painful truths as they do represent them. In this class we will look carefully for places where this occurs because this false relationship between myth and reality can tell us as much as an accurate relationship between the two. (Little Red Riding Hood example)

Combining all three (4a,b,c) may give us the broadest understanding of the culture.

Specific Spring Goals:

Moving from past monsters to current ones, from old to new: Monsters of Science Fiction

Moving from exploring fictional/mythological monsters to factual/historical acts of monstrosity: Science, Crime, The Holocaust, War, Terrorism.

More attention paid to visual design: film, web, posters, comix.

More attention to universal theories of design: Information Design

A little less attention paid to literary analysis: build on/apply previous semester techniques.

Self Examination: application of the past to ourselves, our own culture and the future; changing emphasis from other cultures to ourselves: our monsters, our culture's monsters; changing emphasis toward creation (story, comic, website)

Heroic Creations: moving past criticism toward design and creation of innovative, effective, ethical, practical solutions.