Arie Stavchansky
Adjunct Instructor
Adjunct Faculty
Dr. Stavchansky is a multi-disciplinary professional. As a practitioner of digital media for more than a decade, he works in all phases of production and has carried the titles of designer, developer, creative director, and educator. An Austin, Texas native and first generation American, his cross cultural influences, diverse industry experience and extensive education inform his analytical, creative, and technical work.
Currently, he works to design interactive media products, code software applications, produce and direct video content, and guide creative and technical professionals toward delivering innovative solutions.
Arie completed his Ph.D. in Digital Media Studies and Production at The University of Texas at Austin. For his dissertation he researched how video production techniques affect viewers’ trust in television news. He also holds a Master of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Radio, Television, Film from UT Austin. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a lecturer educating graduate and undergraduate students.
His industry experience spans across a range of brand and studio sizes. He has worked on shipped products for well-known companies such as Nintendo, Warner Brothers, Sony, Dell and Cisco Systems. Agencies and studios he has worked with include Chicago-based Digital Kitchen, Los Angeles-based Mac Guff, New York-based Radical Media, Sony Online Entertainment and Seamless Entertainment. Currently he is founder of Dataclay, a company providing automation systems for video production workflow.
Research Interests
My research interests lie within the fields of interaction design, digital media production and the effects of media on society. Within interaction design, my research has focused on the origins, development, and standardization of techniques for creating digital media content. Specifically, I am interested in how we discover digital image-making techniques and how such knowledge disseminates throughout society. Currently I am interested in how interactive, artificially intelligent applications might assist motion graphics designers and video post-production professionals in their crafting process. In the realm of media production and its effects on society, I research how the design, production, and delivery of information influence the way audiences perceive its credibility. The problems I address regard the identification of credible information in the context of an evolving socio-technological landscape. Such problems become increasingly significant with the continued democratization and automatization of production technique and as new modes of interacting with information emerge. My goals are to create specifications for producers and designers who want people to perceive their products as credible artifacts. Likewise, the results of my research can help information consumers better discriminate between credible and non-credible information.
- Codification of artists’ and designers’ processes into computational systems
- The symbiotic relationship between creative professionals and artificially intelligent tools
- Perceived credibility of moving images
- Sociological effects of digital video content produced with emerging, interactive, techniques
- Technique discovery and the historical development of visual effects for motion pictures
- History and mechanization of image-making techniques, and their impact on culture
- Prototyping novel interfaces for human–computer interaction