Diane Favro, American Fellow
Looking through a set of old black-and-white AAUW photos, I came across one of Diane Favro, a 1981–82 American fellow, when she was a teaching assistant at the University of California, Berkeley. In the photo, Diane is leaning over a light table scrutinizing slides of architectural examples to choose the perfect pair of images for an architectural history class.
After I first contacted Diane about profiling her more recent work, she quickly sent me an updated photo, the perfect illustration of how far she and technology have come in the world of architectural history. The new photo shows Diane leading a lecture in an immersive digital theater complete with curved walls and a 20-foot screen. Today Diane is a professor of architecture and the director of the Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers at the center investigate experiential technologies in teaching and practice and develop tools for creating interactive virtual platforms.
Learning about architectural history in an immersive digital theater
One of ETC’s widely received projects is Digital Karnak, launched in 2008. An educational platform that provides educators with a wealth of resources to develop lessons about the ancient Egyptian temple complex of the same name, Digital Karnak puts the architecture of the temple into a 3D context. Over the years, Karnak has undergone many modifications that are difficult to depict through traditional architectural plans. This rich architectural history is more easily understood through the digital modeling available on Digital Karnak.
In another noteworthy project, ETC, in collaboration with the UCLA neuroscience department, has used the virtual world of Second Life to study the habits of meth addicts. Two distinct virtual apartments were created: a “clean apartment” that acts as the control environment and a “meth apartment” that includes graffiti and interactive drug paraphernalia. Participants in the study experience the Second Life scenes from a first-person point of view and control their avatars with a handheld video game remote. In the safety of a clinical setting, study participants are encouraged to explore the virtual “meth apartment” and interact with inanimate and animate cues, such as pipes, bags of meth, avatars using meth, and so on. The goal is to study how these cues affect participants’ behavior and physiological state.
Diane’s work is somewhat paradoxical, because she looks into the future to get a better understanding of the architectural past. She is interested in creating a digital humanities center that studies how the arts, social sciences, and other disciplines happen in time and space. “There is a paradigm shift in how research is being done,” Diane explained. “The next step is to think about how teaching can move in that direction without completely losing the advantages of traditional methods.” One particular manifestation of this disconnect is in journal publications. Traditional journals often are not adept at portraying the interactivity of digital reconstruction research. Diane hopes soon to see scholarly journals “born digital” and inherently ready to fully engage readers in the innovative technologies that are used to conduct research today.
Reflecting back on the almost 30-year-old photo, Diane thought about the difficulties she experienced searching for the perfect images in the 1980s. Back then, the process could take as long as one week. Today those same images can be accessed digitally in a matter of minutes. And taking that a step further, Diane is working to make those static images more meaningful through interactive digital reconstructions.
