Charles Earl Love Yust is an Information Technology Professional at the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and teaches web design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is a multimedia consultant for non-governmental and non-profit arts organizations in the Twin Cities, is enrolled in art and design graduate coursework, and is a freelance web designer. A number of his projects have been developed in conjunction with the Twin Cities Somali Community focusing on how digital design can help facilitate cross-cultural consciousness.

Charles was co-awarded a 2006 seed grant from the Council of Public Engagement (COPE) for participation in the University of Minnesota Design Institute, and Department of Landscape Architecture collaborative "Streetlife" project. During the Spring of 2005 he documented and developed a web-based guide focusing on the initial semester of Streetlife in which graduate and seminar students developed urban plans for the community along West Broadway Avenue in North Minneapolis. These plans were derived through active engagement with community groups throughout the

West Broadway neighborhood and were meant as tools provided for community level groups to give them more visibility and voice as City and County governmental agencies develop plans for Bus Rapid Transit and other developments along West Broadway.

For this year's project Charles will be utilizing part of the COPE grant to visually map in a Flash-based web-site, the processes and roles of the community, governmental, and private entities that have a stake in what ultimately happens along West Broadway. This project will also illustrate procedures involved in taking a design-driven idea from an educational institution and implementing an intervention in the public realm while taking into account the considerations of community groups and residents. This visual and interactive knowledge map will then be used as a resource for other departments and institutions in the future (work in progress).

To see last years work pleas visit the following link.
http://design.umn.edu/go/project/DESI4050_Streetlife

For more about Charles Yust visit:
http://www.yusthaus.com/

Colin McFadden graduated from the University of Minnesota, College of Liberal, with a degree in Political Science.  He has been a self proclaimed technophile for his entire life, and over the past six years has become heavily involved in video technology.  While he enjoys the glitz and glamour of production, his real passion is the technology behind the scenes.  He is particularly interested in compression theory and implementation, as well as digital signal processing.  As part of McFadden’s job with the CLA-TV Studios, he often works with students to help them understand complex technology.  Because of this, he has also become interested in exploring new methods for technical training.  Aside from video, he pursues his interests in PHP/MySQL development, amateur robotics, and photography.

In terms of the future, McFadden’s biggest hope is that technology will continue to have a democratizing effect.  The intersection of politics and technology is of particular interest to him, and he continues to be optimistic about the ways technology can improve society.  That lofty ideal of his includes everything from blogs and podcasts leveling the playing field of media distribution, to Wikipedia and Archive.org making information available to everyone.

Hope L. Johnson is a technical trainer and helpline consultant for Academic and Distributed Computing Services (ADCS) at the University of Minnesota. She teaches short-courses for University Technology Training Center (UTTC) – a division of ADCS - on the myU Portal, Macromedia Breeze, podcasting, and web design and development.  Hope develops online orientations and training modules for UTTC and is currently working collaboratively to develop short-courses that will be delivered over the web.  She also co-heads the Breeze Server Project and provides production assistance for “Tech Talk,” which is produced at the university and airs on public television.  She will appear on a future episode of the show as a guest expert on podcasting. 

Hope was a co-recipient of a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Small Grant in 2001-2002 through the Digital Media Center.  She is currently a member of the 2005-2006 cohort of the Women’s Leadership Institute through the Center for Human Resource Development and is one of the inaugural members of the iFellows Program, which is part of Innovative Researchers on Campus (iROC) sponsored by the Office of Information Technology.

Hope received her B.A. in film studies from the University of Minnesota and has just completed her first screenplay.  She writes for her own movie blog and dabbles in poetry, and short fiction.

Hope’s technology-related interests include: collaborative working environments using Wikis and web conferencing tools such as Macromedia Breeze, developing online training courses and modules, and how podcasting can be used as a teaching and learning tool.

TO TOP