Course Descriptions listed below pertain to the 2009–10 academic year.

Curriculum Requirements

First Year (30 units)

• Contemporary Issues (3 units)
• Design Research (3 units)
• Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and Intellectual Property (3 units)
• Form Studio (3 units)
• Skills Studio (3 units)
• History of Media (3 units)
• Topic Studios (transdisciplinary) (6 units)
• Writing (3 units)
• Elective (3 units)

Second Year (30 units)

• Advanced Topic Studios (transdisciplinary) (6 units)
• Thesis Presearch (6 units)
• Thesis: Presentation (3 units)
• Thesis: Studio (6 units)
• Thesis: Writing (3 units)
• Electives (6 units)

Electives

• Design in the Unconscious
• Contemporary Mythology, Meaning & Design
• Sound, Music & Technology
• Cinema for Design
• Manufractured: Transforming the Everyday Object

For current course offerings and descriptions see fall and spring courses or visit Webadvisor.

First-Semester Required Courses

History of Media (seminar)

Design is less about giving form than giving meaning; from buildings to newspapers, from surgical instruments to satellites, design creates meaning on multiple levels that shift over time. This course considers design history as the cumulative process of communicating ideas, values, and social practices across a variety of media. We look at design within the larger landscapes of culture and technology and against the situated contexts of the personal and particular.

Design Research (practicum)

First in the research and strategy track, this course introduces students to the theory and practice of various types of design research, including human-centered qualitative and ethnographic methods as well as formal and analytical techniques. Students also design imaginative tools to expand their understanding of a group of people and/or situated context. Representational methods such as personas and scenarios function to help students see and articulate patterns in qualitative data to inform design. The goal is to provide students with research-based skills and resources to strengthen strategic design practice.

Form Studio

Form Studio is the introductory studio class in the Graduate Program in Design. This class offers students a strong foundation in the making, assessing, and critiquing of visual materials and begins a discussion that will reverberate through the rest of their studies. Students learn the use and structure of materials and media and the development of a rigorous and disciplined process through which they can create and analyze what they create. Much is made of the relationship between intention and reaction and the sharpening of an awareness of physiological sensation as an integral part of design development. Successful students ultimately develop the necessary skills of experimentation, articulate criticism. and constructive questioning necessary to generate remarkable work.

Skills Studios

There are six half-term Skills Studios that add up to one course unit of 3 hours. The courses focus on specific skills to supplement or refresh the incoming students' skill sets.

Type

A studio in typography for those who need a refresher or introductory typography skills. Whether exploring or reviewing the basics, this studio is for you.

Sketching

Sketching by hand is an invaluable skill for all designers. The studio concentrates on sketching prototypes and design concepts. This studio strengthens the habit of using a sketchbook as an everyday tool in design.

Storyboarding

This studio is intended to encourage students to represent their design concepts in action through speculative storyboarding. This is an invaluable skill in examining and evaluating a design concept, as well as in communicating the design to others.

Info-graphics

Explore new ways to represent data, information and operations in visual language. This skill is particularly critical in design research.

Rhino

3D Modeling: The Graduate Program in Design uses Rhino, a 3D modeling software tool, in product, industrial and other 3D design.

Processing Interaction

The Graduate Program in Design uses the Processing language in interaction design projects. Processing is especially useful in that it is an on-ramp to Java programming and is extremely useful for making and programming interactive devices and systems.

Writing (seminar)

This is a wide-ranging course in which students study creative nonfiction writing. Students gain experience in writing memoir, journal, personal essay, formal essay, feature article, proposal, review, and other creative nonfiction forms. An online writing component gives students experience in writing blogs and other online forms and also assures each student has established a web page for posting work and writing throughout their course of study. The goal of the course is to make students confident, effective, and interesting writers across all media.

Second-Semester Required Courses

Contemporary Issues (seminar)

This course engages students with their present environment as the first in our series of history/theory/criticism courses. It investigates the broad topic of material culture by focusing on a selection of theoretical topics and historical case studies from the fields of design, architecture, art, and popular culture. It also engages a notion of interface as a way of viewing the world. With a strong emphasis on structuralist and poststructuralist theory, this seminar is to identify the shifting relationship of cultural codes that come about under the complex interplay of ideology, institutions, and cultural difference. Prerequisites: History of Media, Writing.

Strategy, Entrepreneurship & Ethics (seminar)

Designers should understand the fundamentals of business strategies and economic models to engage their profession in a muscular way. This course introduces students to business models for both for-profit and nonprofit constructions as well as individual entrepreneurship. The position of ethics and social responsibility is studied through case studies and discourse. The rapidly changing landscape of intellectual property—from patent and copyright to open source—is examined. Students create speculative business models focused on how they may manifest their professional design goals. Prerequisites: Design Research, Writing.

Topic Studios (choose one of three)

Media Matters (seminar and studio)

"Information" has become the new code word for what is largely an overload of fast-paced images and sound bites, infotainment, and infomercials. Countries, ideologies, religions, artists, preachers, youth, celebrities, and politicians alike are branded and sold to audiences as if consumer products. Our analytical goal is to sift through this clutter of logos, slogans, and hidden persuasion in order to unravel some of the contradictions that result from the mediamakers' access to power, knowledge, and financial resources. In the associated studio course, students explore the ideas presented in the seminar context through making. For example, analysis and insights are put to use in the design and making of antidotes, parodies, and other alternative constructions. Likewise, students are called upon to use methods of communication and persuasion in formmaking for socially positive ends. Prerequisites: Form Studio, Design Research.

Dislocation/Relocation

This topic studio explores opportunities for design intervention around those persons who are dislocated from their homes due to natural disaster, climate change, or other causes. How can design support those who are dislocated? How can design support rebuilding efforts? How can design help when living in an area is no longer sustainable and people must relocate to a new home? Prerequisites: Form Studio, Design Research.

Faraway, So Close

This topic studio explores how we can design and mediate distance relations, including private and public, mobile and fixed environments. It includes examinations of experience design, enabling technologies, and established as well as emergent social behaviors. Prerequisites: Form Studio, Design Research.

Third-Semester Required Courses

Transdisciplinary Topic Studios (choose one of two)

Advanced Topic Studio

Applied Futurism: Designers thinking and making in contemporary social/cultural landscapes—in a moment which appears to be consistently between technological singularities—increasingly need working methodologies that allow them to think past immediate contexts, forms, and personas. The future, however, can be found either one second or one thousand years in front of our noses, and sometimes it lives deep within our poetic human past. So the challenge is composed of imagination, excavation, and recombination: wherever you find the future, it is always present ahead, behind, and around the compositive, designerly moment. The science fiction genres, in both literature and cinema, have always been a rich source of inspiration to engineers and artists of all stripes. By bringing together the ideational threads present within specific bodies of work, it is possible to see the practical applications of a so-called deliberately naive point of view. Prerequisite: History of Media.

Advanced Topic Studio: Exhibition

The public show is both an important fundamental of any design practice and a crucial target for design in and of itself. Through a series of individual and group design projects, we examine exhibitions from initial promotional collateral through installation and interaction at the event to culminating archives. Students gain familiarity with major historical exhibitions, a wide range of exhibition genres, and practical skills in staging exhibitions.

Thesis Presearch (practicum)

This course guides students through the formative stages of their thesis development. After proposing respective areas of thesis concentration, students spend the semester investigating the ways research and formmaking processes can serve as tools for articulating and investigating their primary thesis questions. Through seminars, students examine various discursive traditions, author functions, and interpretive strategies (both objective and subjective). Through project work, students test various methods for formulating their inquiry within material culture. At the end of the semester, each student formally presents a thesis prospectus to the faculty that positions their inquiry within the design intellectual field and identifies methods, tools, and milestones for the thesis project. Prerequisites: Design Research; Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and Intellectual Property.

Students must successfully complete all third-semester required courses to enroll in fourth-semester courses.

Fourth-Semester Required Courses

Note: the overarching idea of these courses is to assure that every aspect of the thesis work is guided and facilitated by qualified faculty. We want to support students in every dimension of the thesis process.

Thesis: Writing

As part of the comprehensive thesis term, this course helps students delineate the range and objectives of their thesis writing, using research, language, and graphical representation to frame and explain their thesis process and artifacts in a written thesis document.

Thesis: Presentation

This course prepares students to present their ideas to an audience. While focused on the thesis presentation, the skills learned in this course generalize to help students gain leadership skills through more effective in verbal and visual communication of ideas in public, academic, and professional contexts.

Thesis: Studio

This studio offers regular, individual advising and engagement and small-group critique with faculty, students, and visiting artists as the thesis project is developed.

Graduate Electives (GELCTs) offered through the Graduate Program in Design

Cinema for Research

Observational cinema has an affinity with the designer's aptitude for discerning relationships among phenomena and imparting structures to experience for dwelling in the alternating currents of ambiguity and for making sense through association, combinatorial play, and projective construction. This video production course invites you to experiment with moviemaking as a process of design research. Our approach comes to grips with the paradoxical nature of cinema that cinema operates at once as both a record and a language. Can you walk without watching your step? Do you mean what you see? Given that the cinema of observation involves a manner of revealing more than a language of telling, how can we define its rules of practice, codes of representation, principles of structure, and elements of style? While using your eyes and ears to respond to emerging patterns in the situation, and moving the point of view to account for dynamic conditions, this exploration involves not only the subject of your observation and the act of observing but also it is systematically guided by the language of cinematic construction. We might say that it exercises your sensory-motor and narrative systems of intelligence simultaneously.

Design in the Unconscious

This course, in distilling psychoanalytic models of meaning-construction in dreams and poetry, attempts to lay groundwork for applications in design practice. Guided by close readings of seminal texts (including contextual readings in linguistics, political economy, and anthropology), we address, through discussions and hands-on work, the following questions: (1) How, technically, might the unconscious operate in the design process? and (2) Why might a design succeed or fail at the level of the unconscious? We examine the ways in which meaning and value become associated with work across a broad spectrum of design practices (architecture, fashion, industrial design, advertising), scrutinizing the dominant terms for evaluating a design's success, form, and function, as equally prone to unconscious forces.

Sound, Music & Technology

Students gain a general understanding of the necessary aesthetics, vocabulary, and techniques to record, edit, process, and organize sound using computers for installation work, live performance and composition, soundscape design, and alternative media. The class includes technical, theoretical, and practical hands-on sections. Students are encouraged to experiment and develop unique sound vocabularies and techniques to fit their particular interests. Each student delivers a final project and presentation that uses techniques and software applications covered in class. Instructor: Guillermo Galindo.

Manufractured: Transforming the Everyday Object

Increasingly, artists, craftspeople, and designers are using familiar mass-produced goods as their new raw materials to create work that addresses consumer abundance, multiplicity and repetition, sampling and appropriation, salvaging and scavenging, and our post-credible world. “Manufracturing” is one of today’s foremost trends in art, craft, and design and has resulted in pioneering work that combines the industrially uniform with the uniquely handmade.

This is a transdisciplinary seminar/studio that explores the phenomenon as a way of creating a new class of objects that are that art, design, or craft, but rather unique hybrids of all three disciplines. Students read theoretical and poetic writings, analyze objects and artworks, and create their own projects and presentations that explore the issues raised in class. Instructors Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov are the authors of Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (Chronicle Books, 2008).

Contemporary Mythology, Meaning & Design

The class examines how myths and archetypes fuel trends, brands, and identity. Students research a particular subculture and its myths and develop messages, visual languages, and objects that align themselves with those myths.

Thinking Objects

This class examines thinking objects - including both the throwaway objects you use to help you think, and finished objects that are self-relexive and provoke thinking in the viewer. Our thesis is that material and conceptual modes are deeply enmeshed: making is a form of thought, and thought is a form of making. Echoing our theses, the class includes a theoretical component and also a set of practical exercises. On the academic level, we will look at cognitive, representational, and aesthetic theories, including Andy Clark, Jacques Ranciere, Claire Bishop, and James Elkins. We will also look at case studies, from Carsten Holler's slides to Diller and Scofidio's blend of architecture and clouds to Isa Genzken's empire of stuff. The course adopts a cynical stance towards art and design, asking why creative practices are now being framed as "research", and seeking alternative modes of practice, including human centered or failure based models. Students will be encouraged to step outside of their comfort zones, to explore unconventional techniques and unfamiliar modes of thinking and doing. The aim is to frustrate our automated responses, and through introspection become aware of the complexities of our making.