Sam Sheffer (they/them) is a designer based out of Boston, MA. Sam considers divergent art forms, sensory experiences and architectural imagination through extensions of the body. Sam is interested in leveraging the potential of design to reveal fresh perspectives and deepen our understanding of the world. They hold a Master’s of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor’s in Geology from Whitman College. Sam is a project designer at MALL (Mass Architectural Loopty Loops), working on projects in Portland, Atlanta and Los Angeles. They currently work as a design critic within the Architecture and Industrial Design departments at RISD.
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
Times: T | 1:10 PM - 6:10 PMInstructor(s): Sam ShefferLocation(s): Bayard Ewing Building, Room 310Enrolled / Capacity: 14Status: Open
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course centers around the digital model as a thing to be built, as a multivalent medium for architectural discourse, and as representation of built form. This course uses abstraction as the common thread between its prerequisite, Architectural Drawing, and an inquiry into the elements, natures, structures, and forms of the complex, temporal, cultural, material and political construct often referred to as "the building." Operations in the course are the techniques of analysis, translation and synthesis. The contemporary digital model is delimited and constrained by architectural software. This course recognizes that expertise in multiple digital modeling software-from Rhino to Building Information Modeling (BIM)-is as imperative as are skills to manipulate, undermine, link, automate and hack the media that dominate the discipline of architecture. A series of creative prompts engage the computational principles that underpin all digital modeling software. This "under the hood" approach is balanced by "over the hood" approaches that see students designing workflows, automation and output between software and material. The course engages the digital model as sample, system, and database as well as continually interrogates the translational relationship between model and drawing and model and image.
Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.
