Media Design, Student Profiles
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Jonathon Toon
Third-year Media Design Student
In the Media Design programme, we emphasise that there is no time like the present—students are encouraged to not only create innovative work, but to get their work out into the real world.
Last year, Jonathon Toon did exactly this, as his project from the MDDN221 Experience Design course was featured in issue 111 of the highly prestigious ProDesign magazine, with the title “The Nature of Living”. This interactive work tracked users motions with customized computer vision software and hardware, rewarding the actor with meditative abstract visuals in an experience highly influenced by notions of Visual Music and Synaesthesia.
“My experience with studying at the Victoria School of Design has taught me that all ideas are possible as long as you put in the extra hours and are committed to see through a project from the initial concept until to the very end.”
Jonathon found this was especially true with his Experience Design project, in which many hours were spent experimenting and refining the interactivity and then the legitimacy of its presentation. Jonathan is also quite active with a freelance design practice while studying. His high-level design excellence is highly sought after—he has even been recruited to work on various internal School of Design work, including the upcoming rebrand of the School of Design website.
Benjamin Jack
Media Design Graduate
Media Design graduate Ben Jack’s interactive installation, Elucidating Feedback, engages the audience through a very novel approach. Rather than relying on a keyboard or mouse, the user wears a special device which captures brain wave data.
Fluctuations in this data are used to trigger various generative patterns expressed through computer graphics programming. In addition to displaying the installation at a local gallery, Ben was pleased to learn that his work will be featured at the upcoming FILE:Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica festival in São Paulo, Brazil.
“Both my professional and personal projects have been significantly helped by the positive push at Victoria to come up with crazy awesome ideas and make them reality.”
Ben has found the Media Design programme at Victoria to be “a fantastic way for me to cultivate an interest and understanding of the ways new technologies can be used for creative expression.” In particular Ben believes that the courses were instrumental in guiding him to “the somewhat evasive point where the logical and creative disciplines meet.”
Since graduating, Ben has continued as part of our community as a tutor for our first year Creative Coding course, while also working full time with the eco-education gaming company, MiniMonos.
