This course deepens the exploration of computational art and design, pushing students to experiment with more complex methods. Emphasizing independent inquiry, students will refine their creative process and technical skills, developing a cohesive body of work. The course encourages critical engagement with emerging technologies and their social, cultural, and artistic implications. This course also provides guidance for students to articulate and present their body of work, engage in discussions about the field, and explore various directions to position their practice.

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

Building on prior knowledge, emphasis will be placed on self-guided, rigorous, research and experimentation. The class will provide structured opportunities for encouraging iterative development and refining ideas through prototypes and drafts, and developing project management/research skills over long-term projects. The course culminates in a public presentation of individual projects, fostering professional development and critical discourse.
 

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

Building on prior knowledge, emphasis will be placed on self-guided, rigorous, research and experimentation. The class will provide structured opportunities for encouraging iterative development and refining ideas through prototypes and drafts, and developing project management/research skills over long-term projects. The course culminates in a public presentation of individual projects, fostering professional development and critical discourse.
 

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

Anyone holds the power to publish. Publishing has long been a tool for communities to reach one another, share urgent information, educate and delight. Translating the personal to the public is not only a powerful way of finding solidarity with others, but creates new paths for disseminating counternarratives. In this course students will learn how to work with archives and generate new content to create a publication from ideation to production—playing the roles of designers, writers, photographers, editors and illustrators.The first half of the course focuses on gathering and generating content through a series of design projects of increasing complexity, designed for students with limited or no experience to gain familiarity with designing for print and the production process. Projects will be supplemented by lectures on the history of self-publishing, guest speakers and a trip to the Fleet Library’s zine and magazine archives to ground students in existing examples of independent and small press publications. The second half of the course will culminate in a collaborative publication produced in multiples and prepared for distribution both physically and digitally. The key takeaways of this class are to develop practical and resourceful ways of creating publications, learn the history of DIY communities and self publication, gain confidence generating original content from personal experiences and interests, and understand how design choices inform how publications communicate to audiences.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Elective

The first core studio in the program is centered on an investigation of the mechanics of articulating meaning in an image. Through a variety of projects, students will investigate the efficacy of various strategies in traditional and new media, and engage in perceptual experiments in order to study the intersection of art and visual psychology.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This studio applies human-centered design to a place under real pressure. Cultural tourism and heritage economies are reshaping small towns and craft regions worldwide, and designers are increasingly called on to respond at a distance: video calls, shared files, and surgical site visits to "capture data" rather than the immersive residencies that build real relationships with a place and its people. This studio challenges that default, anchoring in a real brief for a specific site: Luocheng Ancient Town, a still-inhabited Ming–Qing-era market town in Sichuan, China.

The course builds on the instructor's ongoing collaboration with Bibo Wu, Professor of the School of Fashion Design at China Academy of Art, who will be in residency at RISD for the initial weeks before joining by video from across a significant time difference. Hands-on workshops led by guest faculty from across RISD, in disciplines ID students seldom touch (applied pattern and surface design, embroidery and historical garment contruction, materials innovation, typography), ground the term in Luocheng's customs, foods, and craft traditions before students develop a proposal in one of three tracks: Documentation & Digital Archive, Contemporary Product Translation, or Visitor & Community Infrastructure. Students should come ready to work in direct, sustained dialog with faculty and community members, the project's real stakeholders, rather than from research alone.

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

This course is structured according the notion that artists can use what is on hand to research and craft simple solutions to the complex physical, mechanical, and technical problems that must be routinely addressed in their making practices. This material and process based, hands-on, research studio will be structured in response to the issues that the advanced fine arts student is grappling with on a regular basis. Many of the issues that arise in the process of making provide the opportunity to transcend perceived material-based boundaries and thinking. Some of the questions this course attends to include: How do you defy gravity? How do you generate the hidden components required to physicalize the thing we can see in our mind's eye? How is the magic we need to create our work scalable to the resources we have readily available? Example working processes include: mig welding, tig welding, casting for prototyping, woodworking, and mold making.

This course is open to junior, senior and graduate-level students. Please contact the instructor directly for permission to register.

Elective

This course is structured according the notion that artists can use what is on hand to research and craft simple solutions to the complex physical, mechanical, and technical problems that must be routinely addressed in their making practices. This material and process based, hands-on, research studio will be structured in response to the issues that the advanced fine arts student is grappling with on a regular basis. Many of the issues that arise in the process of making provide the opportunity to transcend perceived material-based boundaries and thinking. Some of the questions this course attends to include: How do you defy gravity? How do you generate the hidden components required to physicalize the thing we can see in our mind's eye? How is the magic we need to create our work scalable to the resources we have readily available? Example working processes include: mig welding, tig welding, casting for prototyping, woodworking, and mold making.

This course is open to junior, senior and graduate-level students. Please contact the instructor directly for permission to register.

Elective

In the first semester, graduate students begin their investigation and produce clay works that allow the faculty to assess their approach and capabilities. Students are available and pursue active contact with the faculty. Students also attend supplemental department presentations.Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Ceramics Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Ceramics

The second semester is a development of the ideas and work begun in the first. Students are available and pursue active contact with the faculty. Students also attend supplemental department presentations.

Major Requirement | MFA Ceramics

Continued exploration begun during the first year leads to the presentation of a thesis project. Students work during class hours to ensure daily contact with faculty.

Major Requirement | MFA Ceramics

This period is designed as an advanced critique course which involves visits by resident faculty, visiting artists and critics, with special reference to current issues and concerns in contemporary art.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

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

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

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

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

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

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

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

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

Creative directors are often artists in disguise, with roles as fluid as myths. They could helm a magazine, a fashion house, or an art exhibition, devise strategies to link brands with people, or they could lead a media platform masquerading as a tech company, or vice versa. Bound by a scope of work, a creative director's work is a collective effort, not a standalone piece. They orchestrate behind the scenes, curating concepts and crafting communication strategies. Their role is essentially non-material—focused more on process than product—and is precise and covert, with the client seen as the 'author' of the work.

This studio course operates at the intersection of creative direction and artificial intelligence, investigating the evolving relationship between AI systems and creative practice. As AI systems evolve from tools into collaborators and potential competitors,  we must reconsider how human creative direction can evolve alongside—or in resistance to—artificial intelligence.

Through hands-on workshops, students will design and train AI models for creative tasks. Weekly projects focus on implementing machine learning models for specific creative direction tasks.  We will explore the possibility of training personalized AI agents that embody and extend individual creative methodologies. Students will develop their own AI creative director agent while critically examining the implications of delegating creative decisions to artificial systems. The course combines applied studio work with critical discussions about the future of creative direction and the ethical implications of automated creativity.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This course invites creative practitioners from all disciplines to play and experiment with the notion of teaching as creative practice. What might happen if we consider the classroom our studio, instructional materials as form, and students as peers and collaborators? How do we push the boundaries of what a lecture, a workshop, a syllabus, a lesson plan, an instructional video, a how-to guide, can be? Whether in the context of higher education, community-based education, early childhood, alternative schools, artist residencies, or the inbetweens, we will take up pedagogy as our discipline and devise multidisciplinary, speculative experiments that redefine the space of pedagogy as one of endless creative potential. Studio work will be scaffolded with readings by thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Fred Moten, bell hooks, and la paperson, and we will consider the works of artists like Nina Katchadourian, Slavs and Tatars, Valie Export, and Walid Raad.

Elective

A defining aspect of human consciousness is creation of meaning through the construction of narrative- a particularly potent mode of communication because it conveys information in a way that allows us to empathetically imagine the lives of others. Beyond the limitations of facts, polemic or data narrative entrances, narrative entertains and enriches us. As such, it is a basic element of Illustration. This class seeks to examine why and how stories matter in the context of traditional and contemporary world culture. We will explore how story construction, narrative voice, imagery, and choice of media intersect to create meaning and reach various audiences. We will look a broad scope of narrative strategies (linear, symbolic, interactive, etc.) from the revelations of the handmade artist's book to cutting-edge technology that is shaping narrative and its reception.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This advanced type studio explores typography as a four-dimensional designspace in which text is designed to be interacted with, responded to, and experienced. Moving beyond typography as a fixed surface, the course focuses on designing text-based environments through interactive type systems and responsive behaviors that shift and unfold across time and space. Through a studio-based approach combining lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and hands-on making, students investigate the technical and experiential potentials of communication design by developing interfaces that activate text. Emphasis is placed on how tools shape formal and conceptual outcomes — and how they can themselves become sites of design activity and artifacts. Work moves across contexts, from print to pixel, hand-held to inhabitable, with an emphasis on human scale. Framed as an experimental typographic laboratory, the course prioritizes iteration, experimentation with language, and the development of participatory feedback loops that surface unexpected behaviors within dynamic environments. Projects range from quick studies to developed proposals, asking students to conceptualize and produce both content and the conditions through which it is experienced. Outcomes may include responsive tools, live visuals, physical artifacts, and hybrid installations. Experience in type design and/or programming is helpful, but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Elective