The ability to conceive and prepare for different future(s) is a vital human capability. Designers are frequently commissioned by multinational corporations, government agencies and cultural institutions for foresight and strategy work. But in times of uncertainty we all have to be futurists. This special topic studio will introduce students to the tools and techniques of foresight practice and discursive design. We will also examine afro-futurism, decolonised futures and participatory design to see how these practices are being used by communities and cultures rarely supported in futures practices. Students will finish the semester with designed objects and written products that support more resilient futures thinking.

If you have questions about the studio, please do not hesitate to contact Charlie Cannon via email. cccannon@risd.edu.

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Thousands of years ago, in the highlands of Peru, indigenous farmers developed an amazing plant that provided high protein yet needed very little energy to cook – it was the nuña, a bean that pops like popcorn! Now, thousands of years later, those same qualities could provide global environmental and health benefits, both reducing our fossil fuel use and our consumption of animal protein. But how can we encourage people to eat these amazing little beans?

In this studio, we will explore that very question, using human-centered design research and iterative experimentation to respectfully build on this ancient indigenous technology. Part foodways research, part food design, we will examine the challenge from top to bottom using seeds developed by the USDA to grow in non-equatorial climates. We will do everything from experimenting with how to prepare the beans to designing research-based deployment strategies and packaging, using design to help lower the barriers to environmentally-sound healthy nutrition.

If you love hands-on experimentation, are interested in design for social good and want to learn more about qualitative design research, this is the course for you!

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Mainstream games, such as Monopoly and Settlers of Catan, normalize extractive behavior, othering stereotypes, and bitter competition between players. Meanwhile, tools used in “community engagement” and “participatory design” in architecture, design, and planning fields create illusions of choice and public approval by gamifying public processes. This studio asks, how can games encourage alternative relationships and interactions between players, and be a medium through which folks of all ages can practice care, collaboration, and learning at the grassroots level?

After examining our positionalities and analyzing existing board games, students will work in teams to develop their own semi-cooperative board games. The game development process will be introduced in stages as students critically discuss how design can both help and/or harm people alongside reflections about relevant personal, social, and political perspectives. The work will include concept sketches, worldbuilding stories, rulebooks, zines, physical crafted prototypes and components, and student-organized playtesting sessions. The primary challenges for students in this studio lie in discovering how to align design decisions with core values and goals, how to source materials ethically, and how their game can be played and produced in community - all while ensuring the game is replayable and fun!

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Have we considered what it truly means to critique? This course explores the role of critique, dissects real-life cases, and challenges existing methodologies to foster more just and equitable ways to look at design.

Well closely examine how professionals, clients, and stakeholders present and evaluate design work to critically reflect on methods within ID and further consider how ethical and inclusive practices take place in the field of industrial design. Students will actively engage in research workshops, role-playing, and discussions to reshape their understanding of design and critique.

By the conclusion of the studio, students will have designed tools and models for public and private critique. Through this, students will be equipped with enriched perspectives and a comprehensive toolkit of critique and discussion methodologies that are continuously applicable in future practices.

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Industrial design’s authorized histories are often produced through designed infrastructures such as museums, textbooks, libraries, corporate archives, websites, and interfaces. These systems do not simply store history; they shape it by determining what is preserved, how it is classified, who is credited, and what becomes accessible.

In this studio, students will design and build a living counter-archive using core industrial design methods including but not limited to systems mapping, prototyping, model-making, interface design, and publication. Projects may take the form of installations, portable kits, shelving or display systems, tool libraries, publications, websites, series of objects, or hybrid platforms. Each project will propose alternative ways of knowing, crediting, and sharing design histories.

The course centers BIPOC designers, makers, and communities, and foregrounds practices often absent from mainstream narratives, including repair cultures, collective authorship, maintenance, hidden labor, and vernacular engineering. Students will examine how design structures can reinforce or challenge inequity and explore strategies for more inclusive and accessible knowledge systems.

Through hands-on exercises, case studies, critiques, and iterative prototyping, students will develop a functioning archive. The studio moves between archive, exhibition, object, and interface design, culminating in a designed counter-archive that expands how industrial design knowledge is represented and shared.

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course examines Chinese Ming dynasty furniture as a system of material intelligence that challenges dominant Western industrial design paradigms. Through the study of Chinese woodworking traditions, students engage with alternative ways of making, learning, and knowing—rooted in handcraft, material sensitivity, and structural logic. Using primarily hand tools, the studio emphasizes making and drawing as methods to understand joinery and structure as generative design frameworks.

In contrast to dominant narratives of design innovation, Chinese furniture demonstrates a continuity of form across time, where transformation occurs through subtle variations, adaptations, and cultural layering rather than radical formal reinvention. This course frames such continuity as a critical alternative to prevailing notions of progress and authorship.

Students will also investigate questions of knowledge production, cultural visibility, and the conditions under which certain design histories become legible or overlooked.

Hands-on making is approached as an embodied method of inquiry rather than technical mastery. Students will produce a series of studies, including joinery prototypes, material investigations, and analytical drawings, leading to the final project. Outcomes may take the form of furniture or spatial/system-based proposals that reinterpret these principles in a contemporary context, articulating a clear design position grounded in structure, material logic, and cultural understanding.

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Context: Industrial designers entering the professional world in 2026 face a landscape defined by rapid technological change, evolving business models, and increasing expectations that designers contribute beyond form and function. Organizations seek designers who can understand how companies operate, identify where value can be created, and translate insight into meaningful contributions.

This course is an intensive, project-based studio focused on how to identify and develop opportunities within real companies. Students will analyze organizations (with an emphasis on those that recruit and employ RISD graduates) to understand how they create and capture value, where they excel, and where they are vulnerable to change.

Through several short, cumulative projects, students will learn to interpret business models, identify unrealized potential, and develop design-driven proposals that respond to strategic needs. There will be emphasis on clarity of thinking and communication, and framing opportunities in ways that are meaningful to organizations and aligned with their priorities.

Working individually and in teams, students will engage a range of companies and industries. Each project culminates in a concise, professional presentation that articulates a clear opportunity and a compelling design response.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Analyze and clearly describe how a company creates and captures value

• Identify strategic opportunities, risks, and unmet needs within existing organizations

• Develop design proposals grounded in business, user, and organizational context

• Communicate ideas through structured, professional presentations

• Work collaboratively to synthesize findings, insights, and designs

The course is organized as a sequence of short, cumulative projects. Each project follows a common framework:

• Understand the company and its business model

• Identify areas of strength, weakness, or unmet needs

• Define a meaningful opportunity

• Propose a design intervention aligned with that opportunity

• Present findings in a clear and compelling format

• Projects increase in complexity over the semester, culminating in a final presentation that integrates analysis, insight, and design proposal.

In addition to developing strategic and analytical skills, students will gain experience engaging with companies they may encounter in internships or full-time roles.

By learning how to evaluate organizations, recognize where they can contribute, and clearly articulate their value, students will strengthen their ability to navigate the transition from academic work to professional practice.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

As industrial production continues to shift toward distributed manufacturing systems, designers increasingly engage with specialized makers, local material traditions, and hybrid digital–physical workflows. Craft Systems introduces students to craft-informed approaches to industrial design, where traditional knowledge systems and contemporary design tools intersect. By exploring these intersections, students gain insight into alternative models of making that emphasize material intelligence, collaboration, and cultural context.

The course builds on the instructor’s ongoing collaborations with craft practitioners and artisan groups working within textile traditions in India and China. These case studies provide real-world examples of how designers and craftspeople negotiate authorship, translation, and innovation across cultural and technical contexts. Students will analyze how craft knowledge operates as a system–one shaped by tools, pattern logic, and generational knowledge. Through collaborative assignments and cross-cultural dialog, the course explores how these systems can inform contemporary design approaches while respecting the cultural contexts from which they emerge.

Tools such as CLO3D and Adobe Substance 3D will be used selectively to explore how traditional materials and patterns can be translated into contemporary design workflows. The focus, however, remains on understanding craft as a living system of knowledge and exploring how designers can collaborate with artisans in ways that acknowledge shared creative contribution.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course is intended to introduce basic sewing skills and soft goods construction techniques in bag making and soft product design. Students will learn how to operate standard industrial sewing machines and create three-dimensional products from flat patterns. Fabric and notion selection for product performance will be taught as students learn to prototype and create final models of bags and soft products. Access to a portable sewing machine is suggested, as the eight industrial machines will be shared. You will be given some basic sewing supplies but can purchase additional materials based on your preferences.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course looks at human need and applies design thinking towards the development of handheld Swiss Army Knife like multi-tools. Students identify specific needs and convert those needs to fully functional design prototypes. The course gives students the opportunity to develop multi-tool system designs and develop those designs into working prototypes. Many design and fabrication techniques are looked at and practiced throughout the semester; CAD/engineering refinement; speculating true manufacturing processes that inform realistic design solutions; model making with traditional shop processes; model making with digital output rapid-prototyping processes. The course teaches students a workflow of product development, starting with concept development, low fidelity hand sketching, CAD development and refinement, and development simulations of true manufactured off the shelf products by semester’s end.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

In many ways, biodesign introduces a fresh paradigm for our era. It’s design with/for biology! As such, biodesign promotes new forms of collaboration, while de-centering the dominant-yet-exclusive focus on humans that human-centered design championed at the turn of the century. Instead, its design tenets are entwined with biological principles. Things grow and evolve, and are interdependent, so the products of biodesign are not thought of as ends in themselves. They’re part of a broader system or ecology that design aims to complement or even enhance.

This semester, we will explore biodesign by focusing on the potential of biomaterials, while engaging key pioneers in the field. Working in small teams, you will be creating your own biomaterials, and designing and prototyping things that make use of them. For the final project, we’ll be working with an industry partner that specializes in producing biomaterials, TÔMTEX. You’ll be using some of their innovative biomaterials for your creations. No STEM background is required to succeed in this class, just limitless curiosity and imagination.

You can check out previous projects at biodesign.risd.edu

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

In this class, students will explore meaningful ways of creating connections and interactions through human sensory experiences, mobility, and gestures using physical computing tools. Students will investigate and identify new opportunities in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables by developing their own research inquiries through a discursive approach to the deconstruction and reconfiguration of cognitive behaviors and communication patterns.

This class is both theoretical and technical. It will begin with a combination of topical lectures and technical demos/workshops, alternating with weekly research assignments and exercises organized around the broad themes of interactions and connections.

To study and challenge the concept of connectivity in digital technologies, students will start with two foundational physical computing tools—MODI and Arduino—along with parametric software such as TouchDesigner and Grasshopper.

Through research, hands-on work, group discussions, and assignment reviews, students will build foundational knowledge and a shared understanding of interactions, technologies, psychosocial issues, and emerging human needs prior to the final project. After several experiments with low-fidelity prototypes, students will develop plausible scenarios that explore how interactions and connections may exist beyond the limitations of today’s technological advancements.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

Graduate Communication Introduction is a studio course about writing and speaking as design tools. We think about writing and speaking in two ways. First as a communication tool and second as a design tool. On the communication side, we address the many ways that writing and speaking surrounds a designed object (as a proposal, as sales copy, as instructions to users, as specs for manufacture, as criticism, etc.). We think about the audiences for those various kinds of communication and how to think about what they want and need. We look at examples of great design communication and we develop and practice our own skills for succinctly explaining our ideas. On the design tool side, we think about the many ways that writing can help clarify and quickly test out ideas. We think about writing as a form of rapid prototyping alongside sketching, model making, etc. We talk about what writing is good at, when other methods might be more useful, and when to combine methods. We explore techniques such as design fiction, scenario planning, and other narrative methodologies that are used in industrial design and related fields.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

Graduate Communication Introduction is a studio course about writing and speaking as design tools. We think about writing and speaking in two ways. First as a communication tool and second as a design tool. On the communication side, we address the many ways that writing and speaking surrounds a designed object (as a proposal, as sales copy, as instructions to users, as specs for manufacture, as criticism, etc.). We think about the audiences for those various kinds of communication and how to think about what they want and need. We look at examples of great design communication and we develop and practice our own skills for succinctly explaining our ideas. On the design tool side, we think about the many ways that writing can help clarify and quickly test out ideas. We think about writing as a form of rapid prototyping alongside sketching, model making, etc. We talk about what writing is good at, when other methods might be more useful, and when to combine methods. We explore techniques such as design fiction, scenario planning, and other narrative methodologies that are used in industrial design and related fields.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

The execution of two assigned design projects provides the framework for a thorough examination of the design process. This structured and intensive studio will focus on the relationship between the implementation of sound design methodologies and successful problem solving in the design process. This first studio experience is intended to provide the methodological infrastructure for the remainder of the M.I.D. thesis experience.

Preference is given to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This required studio continues the explorations you began in Graduate Studio One. Again, you are challenged through a series of projects to purposefully locate your personal position within contemporary industrial design practice. The projects will introduce you to a variety of issues, application methodologies and audiences associated with the industrial design process that will equip you with a critical understanding of the field that can direct a practical means of applying your ideas. At the end of the semester, your deliverable is an exhibition piece resulting from a final self-directed project. This concluding project is a personal, insightful and original synthesis of your semester's activities and clearly communicates your maturity in problem solving design approaches. Graduate Studio Two is offered as part of the Graduate Industrial Design core curriculum in conjunction the required Graduate Shop Orientation and Graduate Communications courses.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This required studio continues the explorations you began in Graduate Studio One. Again, you are challenged through a series of projects to purposefully locate your personal position within contemporary industrial design practice. The projects will introduce you to a variety of issues, application methodologies and audiences associated with the industrial design process that will equip you with a critical understanding of the field that can direct a practical means of applying your ideas. At the end of the semester, your deliverable is an exhibition piece resulting from a final self-directed project. This concluding project is a personal, insightful and original synthesis of your semester's activities and clearly communicates your maturity in problem solving design approaches. Graduate Studio Two is offered as part of the Graduate Industrial Design core curriculum in conjunction the required Graduate Shop Orientation and Graduate Communications courses.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This course gives the student a hands-on opportunity to develop design skills through the interaction with industrial materials that have strictly defined properties. Experimenting with these materials and the processes by which they are manipulated and formed promotes innovative thinking, problem solving and idea development. Students will achieve a more precise, professional and sensitive approach to design while broadening their technical skill base.

Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course gives the student a hands-on opportunity to develop design skills through the interaction with industrial materials that have strictly defined properties. Experimenting with these materials and the processes by which they are manipulated and formed promotes innovative thinking, problem solving and idea development. Students will achieve a more precise, professional and sensitive approach to design while broadening their technical skill base.

This course is a requirement for Sophomore Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course gives the student a hands-on opportunity to develop design skills through the interaction with industrial materials that have strictly defined properties. Experimenting with these materials and the processes by which they are manipulated and formed promotes innovative thinking, problem solving and idea development. Students will achieve a more precise, professional and sensitive approach to design while broadening their technical skill base.

Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design