This course explores advanced design processes and methods of construction. The evolution of a project through a complete design process is required including conceptual and design development phases.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Furniture Design Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Furniture Design

The graduate seminar is a forum for discussion and research outside of the studio setting. Through a series of topical investigations, lectures and presentations, students will explore current design issues, professional practices, directions, and developments within the field, and other topics that will help to formulate the basis of the graduate thesis work.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. First preference is given to Graduate Furniture Design Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Furniture Design

This course culminates the completion of the thesis body of works and accompanying written document.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Furniture Design Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Furniture Design

Introduces some of the complex challenges that confront those who engage with making meaning in the arts. The course begins by establishing an interdisciplinary vocabulary and methodology to address questions of ethics and representation in the arts. The second segment of the course interrogates specific case studies in the politics and ethics of representation. Case studies may be drawn from art, design, literature, music, performance or other forms of cultural production. The course will be run as a seminar with weekly reading assignments, regular writing assignments and in class discussion.

Preference is given to Global Arts and Cultures Students.

Major Requirement | MA Global Arts and Cultures

Provides guidance through the process of devising, writing and revising the prospectus that will govern their Master's Thesis. Students will develop the prospectus through in-depth research into a topic of their choice, regular submission of written work, feedback from peers and faculty, and revision of written work. Readings and discussion will provide additional structure to the course. At the end of the semester, students will submit the prospectus to the First and Second Readers of the MA Committee. Acceptance of the prospectus is a requirement for continuing to GAC-799G: Thesis.

Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.

Major Requirement | MA Global Arts and Cultures

Graduate Glass II continues with the objectives of the preceding semester. It is expected that students continue artistic experimentation and individual growth at an increasingly professional level.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

With assistance from department and outside faculty, the graduate student defines and organizes an evolved artistic viewpoint presented in both a comprehensive written thesis and a thesis exhibition. At the beginning of this semester, students are also required to present a slide source presentation to a department assembly that is a compilation of the previous three semesters' visual research. A professional portfolio is presented to the department at the completion of the student's graduate study.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

All Glass junior, senior and graduate degree program students meet together to engage both practical and theoretical issues of a glass career through: field trips, technical demonstrations, visitor presentations, and direct exchange with visiting professionals from relevant disciplines through student/professional collaborations, artist residencies, individual consultations, critique, and organized group discussion. Class will require reading, active participation in weekly discussions, and prepared student presentations.

First-year graduate students register for GLASS-435G (Fall) and GLASS-436G (Spring).

Second-year graduate students register for GLASS-437G (Fall) and GLASS-438G (Spring).

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

All Glass junior, senior and graduate degree program students meet together to engage both practical and theoretical issues of a glass career through: field trips, technical demonstrations, visitor presentations, and direct exchange with visiting professionals from relevant disciplines through student/professional collaborations, artist residencies, individual consultations, critique, and organized group discussion. Class will require reading, active participation in weekly discussions, and prepared student presentations.

First-year graduate students register for GLASS-435G (Fall) and GLASS-436G (Spring).

Second-year graduate students register for GLASS-437G (Fall) and GLASS-438G (Spring).

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

This class serves as an interface between the new technologies of digital and the old technologies of optics. New digital technologies are given alternative possibilities with the addition of specific projection apparatus (in terms of both, projection optics and projection surfaces), plays with reflection (such as the construction of anamorphic cylinders, zoetropes, and other optical devices), and in the fabrication of project specific lenses. Given the hands-on nature of the glass department, the actual making and/or subversion of traditional optics is possible. The class encourages collaborative work between students of varying experience levels and fosters the incorporation and dialogue between students of the two differing areas of expertise.

Elective

This course helps prepare graduate students to be effective educators while fostering a community of shared ideas while teaching at RISD. Designed to support graduate students while they are teaching in RISD's Wintersession, the course is a practicum in which participants discuss practical and theoretical concerns related to collegiate teaching and learning.

As a forum, the course provides a space for group reflection on teaching experiences and challenges in addition to developing effective learning and assessment strategies. Through structured feedback from faculty, students evaluate their teaching effectiveness and document their development as teacher- scholars through refining, expanding and updating the teaching portfolio. In an immersive teaching and learning experience, graduate students will have an opportunity to share and apply knowledge of diverse learning styles and methods, and an awareness of how social identities produce systemic hierarchies in the classroom to their own discipline-focused art and design instruction.

Each participant is required to be teaching or co-teaching a Wintersession course. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Elective

This course helps prepare graduate students to be effective educators while fostering a community of shared ideas while teaching at RISD. Designed to support graduate students while they are teaching in RISD's Wintersession, the course is a practicum in which participants discuss practical and theoretical concerns related to collegiate teaching and learning.

As a forum, the course provides a space for group reflection on teaching experiences and challenges in addition to developing effective learning and assessment strategies. Through structured feedback from faculty, students evaluate their teaching effectiveness and document their development as teacher- scholars through refining, expanding and updating the teaching portfolio. In an immersive teaching and learning experience, graduate students will have an opportunity to share and apply knowledge of diverse learning styles and methods, and an awareness of how social identities produce systemic hierarchies in the classroom to their own discipline-focused art and design instruction.

Each participant is required to be teaching or co-teaching a Wintersession course. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Elective

This course will focus on the graduate level inquiry of wood-based construction designs and commensurate skills. Lighting and upholstery techniques, as well as outside vendor protocols, may also be employed pursuant to the graduate student's design needs. Graduate students will develop a multi-lateral skill set applicable to their area of study. Thesis concepts are often explored within this class. Students concentrate, in sequence, six weeks of Studio Based Learning of techniques and skills followed by six weeks of dedicated, full scale, designed and executed piece. Located in the Center for Integrated Technologies, CIT Bldg, the Graduate Studies Wood Studio will focus on contemporary and traditional: joinery, shaping, and vacuum lamination construction techniques. In addition, metal (cold working) techniques and manipulation are also covered. Surface treatments and finishing methods for metal and wood will be covered throughout this class.

Elective

Join a community of thesis writers, whether as a first-year graduate seeking to unearth a direction for the Master’s written document or as a second-year graduate engaging the completion process. In an atmosphere that allows you to open up, “stretch out” in reflection, and dynamically gather in exchange, this writing-intensive seminar will enable you to explore relevant ideas, themes, core values, and conduct research in support of the inquiry process. Sessions involve scrutinizing various angles of your perspective as an artist/designer and to write from these angles to discover the emerging aspects of solutions that matter. Each class will suggest a specific theme or principle of inflection to precipitate what is needed for the work’s progress. Included will be several forms of writing: narrative essay, poetic formations, lists, annotation, review, extended caption, as well as several levels of research: bibliographic, archival, fieldwork, dialogue, interviews. Emphasis will be on maps of meaning that will be used as a way to further processes of ideation and understanding. At the conclusion of the seminar, you will have a conceptual focus for your thesis that is clearly formulated visually and verbally. The writings and insights from this time can then be used productively to further the breadth and depth of your ideas through open-ended exploration and self-generated work.

The course offers students a forum for exploring historical and theoretical foundations of contemporary design and craft arts. Readings, discussions, lectures, and writing projects address a range of contexts for the practice of design, from materials and making, to ways that objects are encountered, consumed, and lived with, to design's promises and limitations for dealing with global crises of climate, poverty, conflict, disease, and displacement. Weekly meetings are structured around critical themes selected through student input. Readings and case studies offer points of departure for discussion and writing. Guest lectures by designers, curators, and critics provide viewpoints on contemporary practice. Culminating with a final artist statement and presentation, the work undertaken throughout the term will be oriented toward developing historical and critical frameworks in which to situate students' own studio and research practices.

Elective

Inventive Political Ecologies is a HPSS elective and NCSS core seminar. The course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Inventive Political Ecologies. This course will critically interrogate the many different proposals for inventive political ecologies that have emerged out of the critical social sciences, technology and engineering studies and the broad fields of design, planning and architecture. We will collectively discuss and debate what these inventive political ecologies might offer for addressing and acting on the environmental and climate crisis. We will consider ways in which discussion of “invention” and “innovation” can both open up and sometimes narrow eco-political and environmental discussions. Finally, we will continually consider which inventive political ecologies might help us move towards designing and building more just post-carbon futures.

Undergraduate students register for HPSS S702 - INVENTIVE POLITICAL ECOLOGIES.

Elective

The unknown gap of the 'betwixt and between' is a space of great curiosity and charge. It is a space that has captured the imagination of many artists, designers and writers throughout time. The main interest in this course is to investigate the nature of this space, how it is experienced, understood and given meaning from multiple viewpoints in art, design and literature, and ways in which it can become a space of significance for our practice as artists and designers. As background to our own research, we examine features of the betwixt and between as it is evoked in the writings of the pre-Socratic thinkers, the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner, the lectures of composer John Cage, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's book titled The Third Mind, and philosopher Gaston Bachelard's view of spatial poetics. Artists also walk us to that space, as is the case with Eva Hesse's threshold Works on Paper, Anselm Kiefer's preoccupation with ambivalence, and Anish Kapoor's sublime voids. Most importantly, we will make and write as a way to see and understand the various forms and ways the betwixt and between presents itself in our own work.

Elective

This course is for graduate students in Graphic Design to work independently on visual and material research. Students will explore formal outcomes related to all stages of thesis development. The instructors serve an advisory role in all projects. Students must submit a visual and written proposal during the first week of class, outlining their planned work and criteria for evaluation. Proposals can encompass phases of work development, critical making, exploration of multiple/serial outcomes, and engagement with methods and tools. Student's individual work/inquiry will be the key component of this course.

Elective

This course is an overview of the basic principles of type design. The focus is on negative space, words, and readability. Students will gain a deeper understanding of typography and increased insight into existing typefaces.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Graphic Design Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design (3yr)

This 3-credit course will teach advanced design principles of formal structures, relations, and systems to the eclectic non-GD major students entering the field of Graphic Design from other disciplines.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design (3yr)