TES 112E - Visual Communication I

Course Objectives

Visual Communication 1 course aims to increase the interaction and coordination between the mind and hand; hence it will be the vital tool to develop and improve your design ideas; communicating via sketches, perspectives, use of images, renderings, models, texts and their hybrid use. Visual communication is an integral part of design thinking. Visual communication works not only in expressing your ideas and imagination to other people, or building dialogues around a design topic, but also, and even more importantly, it allows yourself to be able to capture and therefore develop the ideas and imaginations in your own mind.

The studio will concentrate on introducing you to media, tools and provide the experience on its various uses, effectively, expressively and with a critical insight: you will sketch to externalize ideas, draw to map, represent and discuss, and then produce and re-produce these into eloquent graphics. This semester will provide a solid, heart-felt, and hand-felt foundation of various techniques and approaches to both visualization and representation, of ideas, processes, and relationships. Hence, the course forms a basis for your future development as an architect and designer.

Besides visualization and communication of ideas, two major issues to be covered are ‘graphics’ and ‘technical drawing’. You will be introduced to the fundamental concepts of graphics – the issues related to the performance of the various elements of a visual or artboard. Technical Drawing on the other hand will allow you to develop your skills in 3D thinking, handling an object in its physicality and in Cartesian space, and effectively mapping formal properties. This will be a fundamental basis for you to understand and communicate – in an architectural manner –various archetypal forms in context and in scale.

Course Description

This course is expected to cover the following aspects:

Basic elements of visual communication: Line, form, color, texture, shade; basic and complex geometries, topography; object/product geometry; relationship of human-environment-object; isometric and artistic perspective, visualization, basic graphical elements; graphic composition, abstraction, collage.

Technical Drawing Media, Tools and Equipment: Meanings of Line Types, Lettering, Fundamentals of Dimensioning, Principles of Projection, Parallel, Perpendicular and Oblique Projection Techniques, Sections Elevations, Markers and Symbols, Drawing of Structural Elements, Scale in Technical Drawing.