Creative exchange: mdh professor's design course ends with successful exhibition at HNNU in China
14.11.2024
As part of the ‘Undergraduate programme in Art and Design, Chinese-Foreign Cooperative Education Programme’ between Hunan Normal University and the Mediadesign Hochschule, our Media Design professor Sybille Schmitz taught the course ‘Semiotics and Design’ together with HNNU teachers Chen Bo, Zhaofeng Jiang and Jiang Xin at our Chinese partner university in Changsha.
The aim of this course is to transfer complex content to abstract creative forms of expression, to deal with the theory of form and the fundamentals of semiotics. The partnership includes not only a lively exchange of students, but also an exchange of lecturers. Prof. Sybille Schmitz was therefore at HNNU as a foreign teacher from 7 October to 8 November 2024.
At the end of the course, there was a very successful and well-attended exhibition. The student works from ‘Semiotics and Design I’ were presented under the motto ‘From the regular to the irregular’.
Regular means following the norm, observing rules; in graphic contexts it is the familiar, the established visual structure. Characterised by order, measure, system, quantity and basic pattern, conventional visual meaning is created.
Composition, variation, relation, abstraction and sequence open up new paths in the creative process. These methods lead to a different view of things, to leaving familiar paths and to breaking up familiar structures.
The four main tasks of the course were developed with this in mind. The development process of the students is noticeable here. While task 1 - a systematic investigation - still presents itself in an organised framework, tasks 2 and 3, poster series, search for more abstract, freer forms of representation. In task 4, ‘Snake’, the regular structures are abandoned in both formal and graphic form. The work itself is presented in free form on the wall.
A wonderful conclusion to a highly interesting course! If you would like to find out more about mdh's international activities and exchange programmes, you can find further information here:
Photos taken by Jiang Xin and students of the course
