The following course descriptions are for 2007–8.

First 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.

Writing (seminar): This is a wide-ranging course that studies 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 that 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 in all media.

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 will also design imaginative tools to expand 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: CD (Communication Design) + ID (Industrial Design) + IA (Interaction Design) (studio): Form Studio is the introductory studio class in the graduate design program. 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 are creating. 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. Ultimately successful students will develop the necessary skills of experimentation, articulate criticism and constructive questioning necessary to generate remarkable work.

Second 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 through a variety of media. We will look at design within the larger landscapes of culture and technology and against the situated contexts of the personal and particular.

Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and Intellectual Property (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 non-profit constructions as well as individual entrepreneurship. The position of ethics and social responsibility will be studied through case studies and discourse. The rapidly changing landscape of intellectual property—from patent and copyright to open source—will be examined. Students will create speculative business models focused on how they may manifest their professional design goals.

Seminar/Studio Pairs (choose one of three)

CD (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 they were 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 media-makers' 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 utilize methods of communication and persuasion in form-making for socially positive ends. Prerequisite: Form Studio.

ID (seminar and studio): This course will center generally around the issue of tangible interfaces in the visual and haptic realm. This subject will be addressed broadly and will begin with investigations into both person to object and person to spatial relationships and how they are meaningfully formed. Projects through the semester will increase in scope, culminating in the examination of interpersonal relationships as facilitated through objects and spaces, and utilizing scenario building as a methodological tool in determining how the ecology of artifacts around us can, and do, mediate social interaction. The studio will engage in making artifacts and/or spatial environments to test these scenarios. Readings will cover topics from all aspects of contemporaneity, with an emphasis on semantics and phenomenology. Prerequisite: Form Studio.

IA (seminar and studio): This course dives deep into the pragmatics of scripting time-based, interactive multidisciplinary media. With a hard focus on fundamental coding structures and practices, based in concrete problem solving, students will develop the intuitions and know-how necessary for creative authoring. In a critical, collaborative environment students will develop individually motivated projects from conceptualization and modeling, to design and implementation, from analysis to synthesis. Workshops on the elements of sound, moving image, and interaction design will complement reading and discussion of current theory and practice. Prerequisite: Form Studio.

Third Semester Required Courses

Futurism (seminar): 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 both 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 "deliberately naïve" point of view. Prerequisite: History of Media.

Thesis Presearch (practicum): This course will guide students through the formative stages of their thesis development. After proposing respective areas of thesis concentration, students will spend the semester investigating the ways that research and form-making processes can serve as tools for articulating and investigating their primary thesis questions. Through seminars, students will examine various discursive traditions, author functions, and interpretive strategies (both objective and subjective). Through project work, students will test various methods for formulating their inquiry within material culture. At the end of the semester, each student will formally present 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.

Transdisciplinary Topic Studios (choose one of three)

Transdisciplinary Studio: CD + ID: This studio looks at the combination of 2-D visual design and 3-D objects in systems, ranging from material systems to virtual worlds. Prerequisite: One second-semester seminar/studio pair.

Transdisciplinary Studio: IA + ID: This studio focuses on interactive objects: 3-D objects or spaces with interactive characteristics, including sensor networks, mobile technologies, and ambient computing. Prerequisite: One second-semester seminar/studio pair.

Transdisciplinary Studio: CD + IA: This studio focuses on combining visual design with interaction design in domains ranging from web design to computer games. Prerequisite: One second-semester seminar/studio pair.

Fourth Semester Required Courses

All third-semester required courses must be passed in order to take fourth-semester courses.

Note: The overarching idea of these five three-hour 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: Context: This course will help students to situate their developing thesis projects within specific critical, historical, social, and political contexts. They will be charged with understanding and communicating how their thesis projects relate to specific audiences and cultural practices via the framework of the academic institution, the design industry, and popular culture. This is the research component of the thesis process.

Thesis: Writing: As part of the comprehensive thesis term, this course will help students delineate the range and objectives of their thesis writing, utilizing research, language, and graphical representation to frame and explain their thesis process and artifacts in a written thesis document.

Thesis: Presentation: This course is aimed at preparing students to present their ideas to an audience. While focused on the thesis presentation, the skills learned in this course will generalize to help students gain leadership skills through more effective in oral and visual communication of ideas in public, academic, and professional contexts.

Thesis: Production: This course is focused on supporting students in the making of artifacts that demonstrate their thesis research and conclusions.

Thesis: Studio: Paired with Thesis: Production, this course offers regular critique and engagement with faculty, students, and visiting artists as the thesis project is developed.

Grad-Wide Electives

Just Design: The Just Design initiative is devoted to looking at issues involving social justice and social responsibility. The topic of this studio will be determined in fall 2007. Instructor: Karen Fiss.

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 will 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 will 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. Instructor: Maria McVarish.

Teaching and Documentation Project: Participants locate a site in the community in which to teach, take a leadership role in a design project of some kind, or both. This site may be a school, a nonprofit organization, a government agency, or a site in the private sector. A course objective is making learning visible; hence, students document the unfolding of their project's phases. Topics include teaching as performance, the phenomenon of listening, schooling the emotions, the reflective practitioner, and critique and assessment. Instructor: Linda Yaven.

Biology as Master Metaphor: This investigative studio considers the wealth of inspiration that biology has to offer designers of all stripes. While physics can be seen as the dominant science of the 20th century, biology is rapidly achieving dominance in the 21st century. Students will explore offshoots of biological science to inform and inspire new directions in materials, form, function, and meaning making. Instructors: Steven and Maria Skav Holt.

Advanced Typography: 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.

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.).

Course Requirements

• First Year (27 units)
• Contemporary Issues
• Writing
• Design Research
• Form Studio
• History of Media
• Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and Intellectual Property
• Seminar/Studio Pairs (choose one of three)

• Second Year (27 units)
• Futurism
• Thesis Presearch
• Transdisciplinary Topic Studios (choose one of three)
• Thesis: Context
• Thesis: Writing
• Thesis: Presentation
• Thesis: Production
• Thesis: Studio

• Elective Courses (6 units)
• Just Design
• Design in the Unconscious
• Teaching and Documentation Project
• Biology as Master Metaphor
• Advanced Typography
• Thing Theory

Current Courses

See the Course Schedule for current courses and their descriptions.