EFS Foundation-Year Program

The three Experimental and Foundation Studies (EFS) studios—Drawing, Design and Spatial Dynamics—are built around assignments and critiques that encourage students to think deductively and intuitively, and examine the potential of materials as they take projects from concept to completion.

Faculty members lead group critiques—both during the process and at the end of each project—with peer dialogue playing a critical role in advancing student work.

EFS Division mission

What are the possibilities when the mission is to question?

The core of the Experimental and Foundations Studies mission is to raise the level of the students’ questions, to impart awareness that knowledge is evolutionary, and to challenge students to manifest their ideas through inquiry involving academic research, studio experimentation, and critical analysis.

Experimental and Foundation Studies begins the students’ education in art and design at RISD. A faculty, diverse in teaching styles and philosophies, immerse them into a breadth of experiences and a broad range of perspectives, that link conceptually to their future majors at RISD. The faculty is comprised of practicing professionals representing a variety of academic and professional fields and teaching experiences.

EFS curriculum

All first-year students are assigned to a section of approximately 20 students who attend the three studio classes together throughout fall semester. Groups are reconstituted going into spring semester so that students work with a different mix of peers during the last half of the year.

During Wintersession—an intensive, five-week session between fall and spring semesters—EFS students are encouraged to select an on-campus course related to their intended major or to select another Liberal Arts or studio course of interest, choosing from classes in all disciplines and available to upperclass and graduate students.

View the curriculum

Overall EFS learning outcomes

Students completing the first year studio programs will be able to:

  • approach art and design with a sustained focus and a rigorous methodology that includes the ability to construct a question for inquiry.
  • demonstrate the ability to critically analyze their studio work and the work of others within personal, theoretical, cultural, social, and historical contexts.
  • discuss and implement formal design terms and concepts, and understand the complexity of debate inherent in their application.
  • recognize that their sensibilities influence their creative processes, and that these are important aspects to consider in their choice of a fine art or design discipline.
  • recognize that aesthetic and ethical dimensions of humankind influence our understanding of how values, judgments, and perceptions shape our experiences and society.

Student work

Student with virtual reality headset crawling through a red tunnel
Sketchbooks on easels in studio
Students setting up large gateway made of red tarp
Colorful compostions made of cutouts and painted shapes
Student wearing a red multi-fabric cape
Closeup of charcoal drawing in process
Sculptures of creatures made with paper polygons
Paintings in translucent containers connected with a tube
Model of a building made of coiled paper cutouts
Students hanging up a portrait painte on large fabric
Tank made of alternative black and white shapes
Charcoal sketches of mouths and teeth
Laptop controlled contraption drawing on wall

Drawing

Drawing is a meaningful way to investigate the world and an essential activity for artists and designers. While distinct as a discipline, drawing permeates the boundaries among the three EFS programs: Drawing, Design, and Spatial Dynamics. The classroom transforms into an intuitive and sensory-rich communal laboratory that delves into idea generation, perceptual approaches, performance-based drawing methods, abstraction, materiality, three-dimensional structures, innovative visualization, expression, and time-based phenomena.

In Drawing, students build the skills, criticality, and confidence to create works that reflect your own interests, concerns, and aesthetic sensibilities. This expansive exploration introduces you to a variety of historical and cultural traditions and encourages you to develop your own visual dialect.

Drawing learning outcomes

Students completing two semesters of the Drawing program will be able to:

  • identify drawing as a distinct studio practice.
  • synthesize media, mark, and formal elements in their drawings.
  • use drawing for idea generation, and iterative visual and conceptual thinking.
  • develop drawing languages through a responsive and self-critical process over both semesters.
  • demonstrate awareness of drawing as a wide-ranging practice investigating materiality, perception, abstraction, performance, invention, and sensory experience.
     

Design

Design promotes multidisciplinary studio experimentation across an array of media and processes. Students explore the organization of visual and other sensory elements in order to understand perceptual attributes and the production of meaning. Using various methods of expression, you may create objects, spaces, and experiences that demonstrate your analysis of composition, color, narrative, motion, systems, and cultural signification.

Assignments allow for inquiries into scientific, social, historical, technological, and political topics; they provide a framework within which to develop deep concentration, personal expression, dedicated research practices, and critical understanding of visual and sensory perceptions.

Critical and experimental utilization of design principles, which underpin all of the arts, are emphasized. The act of seeing is amplified by the study of physiological and cognitive factors that generate perception. Examined subjects are taken through stages of representation, abstraction, and/or symbolic interpretation to reveal essential communicative properties.

Design learning outcomes

Students completing two semesters of the Design program will be able to:

  • demonstrate fluency with the principles, techniques, and terminology necessary to work effectively in a two-dimensional plane, as well as to establish connections to three-dimensional and time-based modes of making.
  • synthesize diverse art and design methods, including individual and collective work, processes by hand, and procedures enabled by machine and/or algorithm.
  • demonstrate the ability to express visual literacy, be articulate about their design process, and form reasoned critical responses in words and actions.
  • analyze the historical, theoretical, and social contexts pertaining to their work and the nuances of conceptual choices, decisions, and results in a given situation.
  • understand the act of design as vital to all of the arts.

Spatial Dynamics

Spatial Dynamics is a studio-based inquiry into physical, spatial, and temporal phenomena. Its study is rooted in the necessity to consider forces and their effects on structure.

Force is the consequence of energy. In Spatial Dynamics, you study energy and resultant forces in actual motion, stability, and materiality, which distinguish it from Drawing and Design. The structures of physical, spatial, and temporal phenomena are studied through additive, subtractive, transformative, iterative, and ephemeral processes both analog and digital. Mediums and materials that are commonly explored and utilized have a broad range of characteristics due to their organic and synthetic sources.

Most assignments bring in methods from Drawing and Design as components, such as preliminary sketches and diagrams in research, planning, and experimental processes. Assignments reference the histories and theories of art and design and include areas of inquiry that extend to disciplines such as the sciences, music, dance, film, and theater.

Spatial Dynamics learning outcomes

Students completing two semesters of the Spatial Dynamics program will be able to:

  • analyze and experiment with physical, spatial, and temporal phenomena.
  • articulate the importance for advancing inquiry into spatial dynamics.
  • demonstrate the ability to construct physical structures through a range of approaches that engage actual motion, stability, and materiality.
  • identify spatial dynamics as a distinct studio practice.
  • synthesize materials, method, and formal elements in their work.
  • recognize that aesthetic and ethical decisions influence our experiences and societies.

Application requirements

Learn more about applying (first-year admissions)