Creative Practice Showcases
A Study on Informed Hospitality Design: Sharing Experiences with Restaurant Staff through Architecture and Interiors
Creative Practice Showcase Jamie Centeno, Glenn NP Nowak
Anthem Country Club is a private Las Vegas community looking to redesign its club’s primary dining space. Partnering with a local firm and the UNLV School of Architecture, a group of 4 architecture and interior design students was overseen by a professor to help evaluate the space and propose solutions. Students went on-site to speak with club managers, catering coordinators, bartenders, chefs, etc. to hear out concerns and begin developing designs. Climate conditions, guest demographics, and facility visions for the space all helped inform the design schemes. Students devised several scenarios ranging from traditional surface and furniture refurbishments to more radical structural changes and reprogramming. After presenting their ideas to the club’s redesign committee and the project architect, students were able to engage in meaningful discussions on the impact of design choices on guests’ psychology and business operations. The committee’s reactions and concerns to each student proposal were evaluated by the project architect and are currently helping inform the official development of the project. Though the design process was not about arriving at a proposed “solution” it enabled the community to more fully understand the breadth of options and their respective impacts on potential directions the restaurant could take.
Future Campus Master Planning: Showcasing a History of Hospitality
Creative Practice Showcase Ghazal Deilami, Glenn NP Nowak
2000 acres being transferred from the Federal Government to a University for future campus development provides an opportunity for this showcase to shine a spotlight on an academic process that emphasized the importance of balancing multiple stakeholders’ interests. The inclusive process sought to capitalize on the institution’s strengths in hospitality along with the surrounding community’s economy built on the entertainment industry. This real world experience put graduate students in position to practice inclusivity through studying the needs/wants of future students, faculty, community partners, and more to potentially influence future RFPs for this enormous project. Of particular note in the showcase is the design team’s assertion and the administration’s apparent agreement that the University’s land acknowledgment statement could be elevated from words to action in the design of the future campus.
Arts Inquiry as Practice Cosmic Pilgrim: Sound Scape as Creative Experience
Creative Practice Showcase Heidi Powell
This creative practice showcase is one where participants will gain insights into a diverse approach to arts based research in an interactive way. This showcase is suited for art education research at undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on creativity as a lens to investigate complex dilemmas or challenges in the field. Novel approaches using technology are incorporated.
Passive Resistance to AI : A Discovery of Voice and Freedom in the First-Year Writing Class View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Gina Burkart
This project leads participants through an active process of free-writing and discovery. The process is presented as an example of a first-day activity of a writing class that engages students in the release of self, ideas, thought and helps them find their own authentic voice. The process demonstrates how others' writings in a variety of genres illicit a response from our own voice of self and that the process of writing connects us and grounds us in humanity. The process will be used as an example of how we can demonstrate to students through first-hand experience and discussion of the experience the value and need for authentic writing grounded in human voice and experience and how we are at a pivotal junction where the value of perfection and convenience threatens to strip us of our access to this human connection. Discussion of the process, students' reactions to the process and outcomes as a result of the process follow the activity--as well as discussion of other ways to passively resist AI in the classroom. Theorists James Gee, Foucalt, Bandura, and Marzano are used to raise questions and initiate discussion of the intersection of teaching writing, voice, and human connectivity in the age of artificial intelligence.
