Collaboration between the arts and science has been an increasingly popular tool in the fields of learning and creative problem solving. The Rhode Island School of Design has been on the forefront of this integration, having just hosted the Making It Better Healthcare Symposium and introducing a ton of new courses which draw upon design thinking in conjunction with research to develop lasting projects and initiatives. One of these new courses took place this past Wintersession. Titled “Making It (the healthcare reform) Understandable,” the course was taught by Lindsay Kinkade. Students who took the course came from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines from Film and Animation, to Graphic Design, and Industrial Design. Stephan Goetschius and Camilla Fucili were two graduate students from the Industrial Design department who took the course, which challenged their ability to condense and explain large amounts of complicated information, the healthcare reform. “I found the class helpful not just because it was talking about healthcare; It was like learning something to healthcare — you can apply that to whatever else, like whatever complex topic you might encounter,” said Fucili. Coming into the class, Fucili wanted to learn new ways to talk about complicated topics and make them clear to the public. “It is something you can apply to every other project you do and I think if you challenge yourself with something that specific and that tough, you can deal with other things. We learned something about illustrations, graphics, healthcare — on many different levels.” “Learning something through the lens that we looked at healthcare, trying to interpret it,” said Goetschius. “I was excited about [the class] because it’s relevant.” The students started out with a glossary of terms, and worked as a group in the course to try to figure out how the terms related to each other. They developed a system of icons and a color scheme, so that all the projects coming out of the class were cohesive. “It was really, really challenging. You had all these terms that are so specific. I knew nothing about it,” said Fucili. Coming from Italy, Fucili was completely foreign to the legislation, but said that after a month or so, she felt that she had learned so much. “I was able to talk about it and I was able to somehow represent it.” As wintersession is typically the trimester for experimentation, exploration, and learning new things at RISD, Goetschius and Fucili decided that they wanted to use the class as an opportunity to learn something completely new by making a stop-motion video. “I think we both took it on because it was a learning experience,” said Goetschius. “We had never done this and now I am able to take this experience and apply it to what is happening this semester in telling a story.” “Total respect for those people now. We spent entire days taking pictures and pictures and pictures,” reflected Fucili. Their final video is at the top of this post. “Not all problems are solved through tangible materials or forms. What interests me most is social learning — the activity of collecting people’s stories and then applying it to effective social change,” said Goetschius. More of the final projects from Kinkade’s class can be found here and some images of the process and final video done by Goetschius and Fucili are below.
