Course Descriptions listed below pertain to the 2010–11 academic year.

Curriculum Requirements

First Year (30 units)

• Design Research (6 units)
• Design Writing (3 units)
• Form Studio (3 units)
• Skills Studio (3 units)
• Design History (3 units)
• Topic Studios (transdisciplinary) (6 units)
• Business of Design (3 units)
• Elective (3 units)

Second Year (30 units)

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

Electives

• Information Visualization
• Advanced ID Methods
• Experimental Type
• Interaction Theory
• Thing Theory
• Materials
• Sound, Music & Technology
• Spontaneous Cinema
• Research Methods
• Manufractured: Transforming the Everyday Object

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

First-Semester Required Courses

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. The course will explore human-centered research methods with the goal of creating new affordances for health and wellness in our community. Students will also design imaginative tools to expand understanding of a group of people and/or situated context. Representational methods such as scenario-building and structural analysis 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. The other component of this course is the studio companion to Design Research. Students will design and build imaginative tools for use in ethnographic research, to expand understanding of a group of people and/or situated context. In this studio, students will learn visual techniques for representing information and data so as to find patterns and meaning that will lead to new insights. Mock-ups and prototypes will be created in order to evaluate and iteratively develop design concepts that arise from the research.

Writing (seminar)

The goal of this writing course is to narrow the gap between what we aspire to create as designers and how we discuss our work, and the work of others, in writing - as well as in class discussion. The course will emphasize writing praxis. Students will keep a semester-long design notebook, where they will work through a series of weekly exercises, registering specific ideas about both design and the critical study of design, while also mastering key skills for effective written communication. Students will explore and experiment with key forms for the profession: How designers use writing in both the academic and the professional worlds - from critical essays to project proposals, classic to contemporary.

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 three Skills Studios to choose from. The courses focus on specific skills to supplement or refresh the incoming students' skill sets.

Typography

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.

3D Modeling:

Rhino is a 3D modeling software tool that is used by the graduate design program, in product, industrial and other 3D design.

Programming for 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.

Second-Semester Required Courses

Design History (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.

Business of Design (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 three)

Advanced Topic Studio: Identity and Anonymous Space

Even the most anonymous public space may acquire a patina of personal identity for those who intersect it. This studio explores how personal or contextual identity arises in public and and "anonymous" spaces in urban landscapes and dwellings, and how that identity may be changed. Investigations will involve both 2D and 3D methods.

Advanced Topic Studio: Design and Contemporary Health

Contemporary life present new challenges in the domain of health and wellness. This studio investigates how methods of interaction and product design can be leveraged and recombined to help individuals gain or maintain personal health under changing cultural and environmental conditions.

Advanced Topic Studio: Sensing the City

This studio class looks at investigating the social phenomena of urban life using embedded sensing devices, and understanding how embedded technologies can, in turn, change public perceptions of urban phenomena such as climate, traffic, events and space.

Thesis Research & Development (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; Business of Design.

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: 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.

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.

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

Information Visualization

Advanced ID Methods

Experimental Type

This class is about defamiliarizing typography - about reaching under the surface play of codes, rules, and expectations that govern typographic convention - to develop a visceral understanding of how the represented word transmits meaning. Projects range in scope from an investigation of the elemental units of typographic meaning - letterforms - to considerations of the synergistic relationship between the semantic, the formal, and the contextual in the construction of meaning. The ultimate goal is to expand student's abilities - intellectually, intuitively and technically - in the creation of provocative forms of visible language.

Interaction Theory

Thing Theory

Thing Theory is an exercise in speculative thinking that is grounded in empirical research and artistic practice. We will investigate the nature of the object at its most fundamental level: What do things mean, and How do things mean? During the first part of the seminar we will be reading and discussing a diverse body of theoretical texts that address the problem of the object: People have been making and using things for a bit more than 2-1/2 million years, and a rich body of the historical, philosophical, anthropological, and psychological literature attests to the centrality of the object in human experience. The final weeks of the course will be given over to student presentations. Each student will select one object and will conduct a comprehensive investigation into its history, the manner of its manufacture, rituals of its use, its technical, material, and aesthetic characteristics, its ecological footprint, its cost and value, and so on. The final presentation will include a written essay and may be supported by an additional media that may be appropriated (2-D, 3-D, video, practical demonstration, performance, etc.).

Materials

This class traces the infiltration and extension of meaning through materials and material processes. How do we express ideas through materials? To what extent are these and other ideas already present within the materials we employ in our designs? With one foot planted firmly in phenomenology - the "sense making" of sensory information - and the other tracing the path of the mad scientist, our approach will combine hands-on investigations into the physical properties of materials with studies in poetic and semiotic praxis.

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.

Spontaneous Cinema

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.

Research Methods

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).