ABOUT THE COURSE:
CS 450 is a transdisciplinary undergraduate course developed and currently taught at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. Designed to bring together fine arts/visual communication design and computer science students for the creation and implementation of collaborative visual/audio projects that draw upon the specialized knowledge of both these disciplines, in it’s 5th year the course’s students work output has generated a substantial body of publications presented at international conferences including Siggraph, Siggraph Asia and Info-Vis.
The design of the course focuses on bringing students from separate fields of learning together; neither party relinquishing their areas of expertise and most importantly, neither party being required to learn the other’s skills. In other words the aim is not to make artist/designers out of engineers and vice versa. What is aimed at is the formation of teams, comprised of one artist/designer and one computer engineer, each of whom will bring their individual skills, expertise, talent, creativity and viewpoints into the development of one single project, from its conception to its implementation to its final presentation.
The course was developed in the spring of 2003, by computer scientist Selim Balcisoy, specialising in computer graphics and artist/designer, Elif Ayiter, specialising in electronic applications. Both being practioners in their fields as well as academicians and both having encountered collaborative projects in their separate practices, gave them an insider’s knowledge and appreciation of the need to develop common languages; a transdisciplinary understanding of disparate areas of expertise as part of the curriculum, both for artist/designers and engineers. This original instructional team of Balcisoy and Ayiter was enhanced by a third faculty member, architect/photographer Murat Germen, in 2005. This team has been awarded the IBM Faculty Award in 2007 for their work in a collaborative project in 3D visualization.