The 6-credit Advanced Design studios offer second semester juniors and seniors the opportunity to investigate product, socially responsible, and sustainable design; innovation through science and technology and other topics in contemporary practice. These studios are designed to strengthen the student's ability to conduct research, ideation, material exploration, presentation, and concept validation. Studios meet two days per week. Junior and Senior Industrial Design Students are required to take a total of three (3) advanced studios.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior, Senior or Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design, MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design

“In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.”
– Zhuangzi 475 BC

This class will look at design from a multitude of perspectives: tracing philosophical trajectories of design to address the idea that designers are not to be trusted; and that perhaps the very concept of “the designer” has more in common with the trickster, the pickpocket, and the sab-oteur with its ability to coax effects from the world, rather than imposing effects on it by the application of force alone. The Ancient Greeks even had a dedicated term, Métis, for this dimension of design, which is implied where extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials, linking the construction of artifacts with daring military stratagems, programs of seduction, insidious courtly intrigues and even the ability of foxes and rats to evade capture and control. Through a series of design workshops, thematic design briefs, readings and (mis)readings alongside discussions from external guests this class will examine the larger cultural meanings, material context and philosophical underpinnings of design: from basic language and semiotics–to cinema and fiction–to relatively small-scale industrial products and large-scale infrastructural and ecological systems.

Learning Outcomes: Skills in applying a broader knowledge and theory to design(ing), demonstrating elastic thinking to address design problems at any scale, storytelling and presentation; film-editing, photography, art-direction and advanced concept prototyping.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design, MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design

This design seminar provides strategies for advanced research, frameworks for experimental practice in design, and prepares students for pursuing individual projects such as a thesis and deals with a range of scales and contexts through a series of structured experiments and collective engagements in design.

Experimental design practices; refers to design as a situation that deliberately sits at the edge of discipline. This studio/seminar class encourages students to explore diverse contexts and issues through projects and texts that consider the impact of design with new technologies, material exploration and ecologies, economic systems, culture and society. We will explore design as a means to understand and engage with social order, to adopt an open investigative approach to questioning cultural products and practices and how they affect and enforce the perspectives; values, ideas and beliefs that underpin contemporary society in an expanded exploration of contemporary design and its literacy.

What opportunities can free thinking design practitioners uncover through direct exploration of the complexity of design’s role in developing political, cultural, economic systems and social structures as products? Within this class we will reassess the discipline, and reconsider the practice of design, free from the marketplace, but not exclusionary. Allowing an autonomous position to question and challenge a broad range of cultural phenomena, patterns of social interaction and the behaviors in which they are used.

This class will work across both conceptual and material experiments; from tangible objects and interfaces to intangible material processes such as the use of AI as a material exploration. The class will be taught through a series of technical demonstrations, workshops, project briefs, visiting guest speakers and external critiques. The outcome of which will be a series of products / tools / interactions that seek to question social, economic and political order of not only how things are made, but in what context, why and for whom.

Elective