Extreme Environments in Design Education

Since 2012, City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media has sent trans-disciplinary teams of art and science students to remote sites in the Mojave Desert, Antarctica and unexplored cave networks in Southeast Asia.  The Extreme Environments Program is a highly- regarded experiment in arts-based field research. Students work with leading climate scientists on site to learn and master a range of computational sensors to measure various natural phenomena. Upon their return to Hong Kong, the students use the collected data and the tools of media art to connect the distant location to the public through game applications, interactive cinema, immersive environments, kinetic installations, mobile experiences and a range of other emerging presentation technologies. By measuring and creatively displaying both a site’s climate data as well as the researcher’s experience, the program hopes to better understand mankind’s relationship with nature.

As an art school leading a field research expedition, the program empowers and reconsiders the Applied Arts of film, animation, installation, game design and programming. With a 360-degree cinema, full and half domes, motion capture systems, labs stocked with sensors and robotic controllers, etc. the school is a center for utilizing unique tools and resources for interpreting content and presenting it in new forms. Data is not just visualized but mediated---interpreted creatively through the use of these new tools. Hong Kong’s Extreme Environments Program is an education initiative that combines the mediation of the field researcher with a location’s hidden forces to create an art/science hybrid that presents complex environmental concerns through embodiment and new forms of interactivity and spectatorship.