JD BELTRAN & SCOTT MINNEMAN LEARNING INTERACTIVELY Faculty members JD Beltran and Scott Minneman teach graduate design at CCA. Both have active creative and consulting practices in addition to their work with students. Beltran is a conceptual artist who works in several media, and she is currently president of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Minneman is an independent consultant who creates interactive experiences for hands-on museums, and he is also an affiliate researcher at the Institute for the Future. Working together, Beltran and Minneman have created the Cinema Snowglobe, an interactive artwork that incorporates films or animations amid small parti-
BY JEREMY JOAN HEWES
You both teach design courses for graduate students. Could you discuss how you work with students who are doing projects and other assignments? SM I teach some higher-level “topic studios” (semester-long, project-based courses); some are exclusively interaction design. For instance, I’ve developed (with Maria Mortati) a studio on public interactivity. The subject matter ranges from the mundane walkup-and-use sorts of things (such as an atm or parking meter) to interactive museum installations. I’ve had a practice, for 15 or so years, of creating hands-on interactive installations for museums and technology centers, so there’s a pretty broad range of topics that get covered in that studio.
JDB I do project-based teaching, but I also teach another course, Conceptual Cartography, which essentially aims to build the skills and approach for abstract thinking about design. It’s
cles of “snow” that move and settle. 26