Welcome to Digital Design Foundation

Standards Development

Overview
One of the chief purposes of the Digital Design Foundation is to seed collaboration on the establishment of a meaningful certification standard for the animation industry in China. Today, training schools, colleges, and software development companies have a diverse set of graduation diplomas and certificates to ascertain achievement. However, due to both uneven quality in implementation and varying standards across institutions, these certifications are almost useless to potential employers. Instead, employers rely heavily on applicant show reels or portfolios. Unfortunately, these suffer from another set of limitations, due to fraud, inability to separate individual and group work, and narrowness of content. There simply does not exist any other metric or rubric for standardized assessment.

And yet, this is an idea whose time has come. Just like the emergence of a standardized program for computer science in the 1980s, or the National Bureau of Professional Teaching Standards in the US in the 1990s, animation is ready for professional standards. Because a large component of animation is artistic and inherently subjective, the standards need to reflect a variety of metrics for quality. Similar to architecture or teaching, animation standards need to first classify the breadth of relevant skills. The technical areas, such as proficiency with software tools, can be measured in a test environment. The artistic and subjective content, however, will need to use portfolios, exhibitions, and expert judgment.

From Here to There
The establishment of standards for animation will require unprecedented collaboration across academic institutions, studios, game developers, tool developers, and eventually (in China) the relevant Ministries. The DDF is intended to be the forum and locus for such collaboration. These are some of the methods and resources that the DDF will implement:

1) Web Site – an online community for exhibition of student work and expert evaluation. The goal will be to classify different projects and content into groups in such a way that students and employers have a uniform understanding of the dimensions of quality.

2) The Oscar Tour - schedule a tour of major cities in China with some of the leading Oscar-winning animators from the West. During the tour, animators will present their own work and discuss the details of each piece presented. In addition, the DDF will organize one-day workshops with the Tour animators to enable students and professionals direct feedback on their work.

3) The DDF Conference - through a large-scale annual conference and exhibition in China, the DDF will bring together interested international and domestic stakeholders for several days of sessions and workshops on this issue. The goal will be to engage all relevant stakeholders of China’s animation community on the development of standards, pedagogy and international cooperation.

4) Board of Advisors - The DDF is establishing an international Board of Advisors from industry and academia based on their expertise and recognition within the animation community. Many of these individuals will also participate in the Oscar Tour. The Board will have the responsibility of reviewing any draft proposals and advocating their use by employers.

5) The Laboratory School - Institute of Digital Design (IDD) is designed to be a laboratory school for these standards. As standards emerge from industry, IDD will incorporate them into the IDD curriculum and assessment. Over time, the goal will be to prove that these standards and assessment are:
a. valid — they measure quality in the same way experts from industry do;
b. reliable — the metrics do not depend on the evaluator; there is a high degree of inter-observer consistency);
c. unbiased — only differences in preparation of the curriculum, not other factors or relationships, are responsible for differences in scoring.

The IDD will also work with the DDF Board of Advisors to develop meaningful rubrics and evaluation procedures for internal use. The purpose will be to show that once the Board specifies a criterion, the IDD faculty is then able to teach and assess it. In addition, IDD’s assessment practice must be cost-effective before other institutions in China will be willing to adopt it.