JOPLIN – Taylor Moon, an assistant professor of graphic design at Missouri Southern, was recently featured as a speaker during the 2019 Caribbean Developers Conference in the Dominican Republic.
“I heard about next year’s themed semester focusing on the Caribbean, and was interested in opportunities for scholarly research on how they deal with art and graphic design,” Moon says.
“I was researching conferences and found this one and saw they had an application for speakers. I submitted a proposal for a session on how 3D graphics, tactile arts and 2D vectors could be combined. I was selected for that talk.”
The annual conference, held Oct. 4-5 at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Punta Cana, features software and entrepreneurs from around the world presenting on timely topics in the fields of IT and business. The lineup for this year’s event featured speakers from Microsoft, IBM, Megsoft, Amazon and other companies and organizations.
“Oftentimes, people in my role are taught to package designs that are then handed off to web developers,” says Moon. “It was exciting to engage with these web developers to see what happens after that handoff and how software is formed. David Neal is a YouTuber and a resource I used throughout my academic career when learning how to code and get through JavaScript problems when I got stuck … I was a little star-struck seeing some of the influencers of technology.”
Diversity and the growing importance of women in the IT fields were part of the focus of the conference, and government officials from the Dominican Republic partnered with the event to introduce citizens there to developers from around the world.
Moon says her presentation discussed the “boundaries and fluidities” of different art mediums and the ways in which 3D models and 2D illustrations can be combined.
“I also talked about merging tactile arts into very dynamic motion graphics and how you can do overlays … such as 3D over 2D, and using the lens of one to view the other.”
Moon, who joined Missouri Southern for the Fall 2019 semester, teaches digital design. A graduate of the University of California-Santa Barbara, she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oxford.
