Frank Smithson
Faculty Member, MIT School of Architecture, History, Theory, and Criticism Program

Frank Smithson is a 53-year old senior faculty member in the History, Theory, Criticism Program in the Department of Architecture at MIT.  Trained as an art historian, he works on urbanism, performance theory, art and architecture. He teaches introductory courses in the history of architecture “from Caves to CATIA” (a digital architectural drafting tool), but also offers graduate seminars on more specialized scholarly areas such as the imaginary architecture of Piranesi.  His current research project investigates the relations between maps and architectural history in Renaissance Italy.  With his family, he loves to cook and to travel, and he is an expert on the best restaurants in Tuscany.

Level of Experience with Computers
Frank uses computers for routine word processing tasks, but primarily still teaches with slides.  He is willing to learn new computer skills, and has become adept at scanning and transporting images in association with his research and publishing activity.  He is currently producing his first Power Point lecture, to gain some comfort level teaching with digital images.

Professor Smithson’s goals
•Use high quality image to support his teaching, for presenting in the classroom and making available to students for use outside of class for review and writing projects
•Create and manage his own image collections to support his teaching
•Find reliable and easy to use tools to create and manage his image collections
•Find a reliable and easy to use tool to present his image collections (something to take the place of the slide projector
•Find images he can use to support his classroom teaching and for use by students outside of class for review and writing projects
•Find images by a particular artist, image title, period, country of origin, pluspossiblech as “map,” “Palermo,” “gothic architecture,” or “vellum...”
• searching by course number or “prior reserve.”  Fantastic labor-saving device to be able to sort grouped images by previous use, e.g. by lecture number and/or lecture date.
• some way to share knowledge, possibly using “affinity” search tools where you’d learn that “other people used this image, would you like to connect with them?” or some such... or, “if you liked this image, you might be interested in this one” – a substitute for the slide drawer, stack search, or other ways to increase serendipitous “thunderbolts” that fuel knowledge.

 Find images by a particular artist, image title, period, country of origin, plus possible mediumds such as “map,” “Palermo,” “gothic architecture,” or “vellum.