Gürkan Maruf Mihçi

Bio:

Gürkan Maruf Mihçi is Assistant Professor and Co-Coordinator of Foundation Studies at IU Indianapolis Herron School of Art and Design and pursues his PhD at Istanbul Institute of Design. He has his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Graphic Design (Bilkent University) and, Master of Arts in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design (Sabanci University) with the concentration in Audio Visual Noise and Glitch. He has also Central European University Graduate Certificate in Culture and Politics and Maker Teacher Certificate in Robotics and 3D Printing. He is a board member of World Listening Project and member of World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and AIGA.

He exhibited his collective and individual audiovisual art and media works in festivals and exhibitions such as; Gallery 263; Boston, USA, Dystopia Sound Art Festival; Istanbul, Turkey, Radio Zero Festival; Porto, Portugal, Monsters International; Montreal, Canada, Animatu Digital Animation Festival; Portugal, Conde Duque; Madrid, Spain, Mestre Film Fest; Venice, Italy, FILE – Electronic Language Festival; Sao Paulo, Brazil, 0090; Antwerp-Mechelen, Belgium, Greenpeace Artist onBoard Residency Program; Turkey, AkSanat Contemporary Artist Competition; Turkey, Apartment Project; Berlin, Germany, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival.

View his full website at https://gurkanmihci.com.

You can contact Gürkan at moc[dot]liamg[at]ichimg.

Teaching Philosophy:

World Economic Forum is a NGO and summit. Its mission is "committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas". Its annual summit hosts some 3,000 business leaders, international political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists for up to five days to discuss global issues, across 500 public and private sessions. 4 years ago, World Economic Forum listed top skills you need to succeed in 2020. These skills are so interesting in the age of technology. Top three skills are Complex Problem Solving, Critical Thinking and Creativity. Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Complex Soft/Hardware Systems and Machine Learning are the popular terms in the contemporary world of business and academia but isn’t creativity related with these technical skills or not? Teaching Philosophy addresses these questions: What is creativity, and why do we need it? Can creativity be taught or is it an inherent trait? How can we improve our creative skills? Why do we need art and design skills? What are relationships between Complex Problem Solving, Critical Thinking and Creativity? There will be also a group workshop on the creativity, critical thinking and complex problem-solving skills. I investigate the relationship between creativity and play using an educational game and identify how video games affect our creative process. Recently, I have been developing a one-level game to teach creative strategies and create meaningful images for the foundation students at Herron School of Art and Design at IU Indianapolis. In this game, I emphasize the relationship between creativity, and complex problem solving, and try to measure the effects of creative digital games on short term education as a workshop. I also examine how creative digital games help to teach creativity, complex problem solving, and how video games can be part of the creative learning process as a workshop. Digital games are very useful tools to teach creativity strategies to create meaningful visuals. First of all, playing digital games and teaching art/design use the same “learning by doing” learning approach. Second, players face different and various problems in digital games and they try to solve these problems. Third, “gamification” is a very effective ability to manage and foster creative skills. Therefore, I have been working on a game for my foundation year courses.