This seminar is for graduate students who are preparing their written thesis. Within the context of this writing-intensive course, we examine the thesis form as an expressive opportunity to negotiate a meaningful integration of our visual work, how we think about it, and how we wish to communicate it to others. In support of this exploration, weekly thematic writing sessions are offered to open the imaginative process and to stimulate creative thinking as a means of discovering the underlying intelligence of our work. In addition, we also engage in individual studio visits to identify and form a coherent 'voice' for the thesis, one that parallels our actual art involvement. Literary communications generated out of artists' and designers' processes are also examined. The outcome of this intensive study is the completion of a draft of the thesis.

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 aims to create sufficient awareness of what yields life on earth, and a complementary biocentric view of the world. New ethical and critical challenges are continually presented to human society with the growth of material science and its implications for design; the course introduces sources and research references to assist with our understanding of these challenges. We explore aspects of human knowledge of living systems, providing a research-based approach to such topics as BioDesign; biomimicry in materials, processes, and structures; functional morphology and the cognitive phenomena of Biophilia. The 'affinities and aversions' we as humans have regarding natural living systems are in everything: from the spaces we inhabit to the metaphors we employ in order to understand complexity in general, including issues connected with health, recuperation and resilience. Using the recently extended facilities and resources of the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, faculty and graduate students together create opportunities to experiment, observe, and learn about the networked aspects of living systems, materials, structures and processes. Theoretical frameworks associated with the biology of living systems, the growth and formation of natural materials including the contemporary revolutions in evolutionary theory are introduced and examples discussed with visiting specialists.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00

Elective

The course aims to create sufficient awareness of what yields life on earth, and a complementary biocentric view of the world. New ethical and critical challenges are continually presented to human society with the growth of material science and its implications for design; the course introduces sources and research references to assist with our understanding of these challenges. We explore aspects of human knowledge of living systems, providing a research-based approach to such topics as BioDesign; biomimicry in materials, processes, and structures; functional morphology and the cognitive phenomena of Biophilia. The 'affinities and aversions' we as humans have regarding natural living systems are in everything: from the spaces we inhabit to the metaphors we employ in order to understand complexity in general, including issues connected with health, recuperation and resilience. Using the recently extended facilities and resources of the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, faculty and graduate students together create opportunities to experiment, observe, and learn about the networked aspects of living systems, materials, structures and processes. Theoretical frameworks associated with the biology of living systems, the growth and formation of natural materials including the contemporary revolutions in evolutionary theory are introduced and examples discussed with visiting specialists.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00

Elective

This course frames contemporary art as a set of conversations, arguments and counterarguments that have been proposed in key exhibitions, works of art, and critical writings produced across multiple continents over the past three decades. We will identify and critique the ideas that have shaped contemporary art, discuss their impetus, and examine their assumptions. Through such conversations, the course presents contemporary art as a form of processing a present and a past in which the artwork is indivisible from the dialogues and conversations that create, define and continue to change it. The title of the class alludes not only to the idea of making and reading contemporary art as cognitive, rhetorical and dialogic activities, but also to the art world as a series of geographically dispersed and temporally promiscuous processes, deeply resistant to modernist systems of order, periodization and mapping. The course combines lectures by the instructor, as well as by visiting critics and art historians, which outline some of the key issues and historical pressures of contemporary art, alongside seminar-type discussions where we process the lectures and select readings as a group.

Elective

The course offers graduate 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 studio course will teach design fundamentals to the elective non-GD major students entering the field of Graphic Design from other disciplines, and will feature in-class instruction which may include 2D and 3D form basic principles of color; image-making from photography, drawing, collage, etc. point and plane / figure and ground exercises; sequencing and exposure to various formats, etc.

Please contact the department for permission to register; registration is not available in Workday. 

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)

This seminar will present a forum for discussion on critical issues in graphic design, including: design's context within culture and experience; theory and its relation to practice; and current practice and its models. The course will combine formats of lecture, discussion, small groups, and collaboration to explore the porous borders of graphic design thought and making.

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

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design

The objective of this course is to assist students in the development of methodologies for exploration, investigation, and construction of a well-designed proposal of thesis work. This seminar provides students with a variety of discursive and exploratory means to identify, locate, reflect on, and develop areas of interest to pursue in the evolution of individual thesis planning, culminating in the presentation of the thesis proposal.

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

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design

This studio course, as groundwork for the graduate thesis, will emphasize inquiry as a primary means for learning. Through making, reflection, collaboration, and critique, we will explore the underlying principles that design objects require, and synthesize theory and practice as necessary partners in graphic design. We will look at the designer's role in the process of revealing and making meaning - as an objective mediator, and as an author/producer, integrating content and form across projects as visual expressions of the preliminary thesis investigation.

Please contact the department for permission to register; registration is not available in Workday. 

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design

This studio course is based on the premise that the narrative shaping of information is fundamental to human communication. As active participants in cultural production, graphic designers naturally collaborate within varied areas of expertise, assuming a documentary role in how society views itself. Narrative methods enable us to speak to (and through) any content with a sense of the story it has to tell - visually representing historical, curatorial, scientific, and abstract ideas and events. Students will explore design as a process of storytelling that includes linear and non-linear relationships, with an emphasis on developing formal strategies for multiple approaches to shaping a narrative experience from given as well as self-generated content. Particular emphasis is on sequence, framing, cause and effect, the relationships between elements, and the synthesis of parts into wholes. With text and image, and across media, we employ narrative methods to make sense of complex content meant to be shared and understood.

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

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design (2yr)

The MFA degree requires completion of a graduate thesis. The thesis, as a major undertaking for advanced study and personal development, also assists the student to direct a program of study for an experience that best serves that individual's interests and needs. The thesis is an inquiry into the process, expression and function of the visual in graphic design. Visual search is the primary means by which to develop and substantiate original work which provides proof of concept for the thesis argument, critique, or point of view. The graduate student is encouraged to go beyond established models and to project his/her unique character in the thesis rather than to evidence vocational training, which is implicit. The productions can involve any medium suitable to need and content. Ultimately the thesis is submitted as a written document supported by a body of visual work that is a meaningful synthesis of the visual and verbal, and a lasting contribution to the field of graphic design. Two copies of the document remain, one for the Library and one for the department. Completion is required before graduation as stipulated by the College.

Please contact the department for permission to register; registration is not available in Workday. 

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design

This course is a continuation of the work begun in fall semester's Graduate Thesis I (GRAPH 327G). The 6-credit studio component is complemented with a 3-credit thesis writing seminar, together guiding the synthesis of independent visual and verbal investigations into a coherent thesis body of work. The MFA degree requires completion of a graduate thesis. The thesis, as a major undertaking for advanced study and personal development, also assists the student to direct a program of study for an experience that best serves that individual's interests and needs. The thesis is an inquiry into the process, expression and function of the visual in graphic design. Visual search is the primary means by which to develop and substantiate original work which provides proof of concept for the thesis argument, critique, or point of view. The graduate student is encouraged to go beyond established models and to project his/her unique character in the thesis rather than to evidence vocational training, which is implicit. The productions can involve any medium suitable to need and content. Ultimately the thesis is submitted as a written document supported by a body of visual work that is a meaningful synthesis of the visual and verbal, and a lasting contribution to the field of graphic design. Two copies of the document remain, one for the Library and one for the department. Completion is required before graduation as stipulated by the College.

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

Major Requirement | MFA Graphic Design

This graduate-level studio elective course will use the term "variable" as a core trajectory through the semester, and will focus on methodologies to visualize these variable design spaces; exploring the potentials of working within single to multi-axis frameworks. Inside these spaces, instances (artifacts) can be interpolated (generated). From analogue tools to variable letterforms, this elective will consider the technical and poetic potentials related to the process of interpolation; from observing two knowns, an unknown can be defined.

This elective will consider typography and typographic technology as generative worlds of practice for study; containing endless rabbit holes to explore, engage with, and return to. We will specifically explore variability in relation to the production of type, and curiously chart the number of ways in which the tools/programs of type production can be used (and mis-used) to animate forms (letters or otherwise). We will navigate the relationship between the history of code, and the history of font production, to find ourselves making within the current context of variable type technologies. Primarily a studio-centric ‘off-road typography’ making and prototyping environment, the course’s critical dialogue will focus on the transformation of language and communication through these variable design processes.

Elective