This course challenges students to rethink how they gather inspiration and conduct research for art and design practices. By engaging new sources and collaborative methods, students can creatively generate original research that counters harmful narratives, combats erasure of identity and culture, engages collective memory, celebrates personal experience, or reveals unanticipated insights about a topic, whether new or old to their practice. This course is for students of any discipline, at any stage of their academic journey. Using free tools, students will create publicly accessible, participatory web archives. Students will create surveys, and activate online and in-person networks to gather submissions around a topic of their choosing.

Students will learn to connect their surveys to HTML, enabling responses to auto-populate a website they design. No previous coding experience required. The course combines studio practice, lectures, readings, and discussions. Students will be introduced to key figures such as Mindy Seu, Chia Amisola, and Zoë Pulley to provide examples of how web-based archives can inform and be a part of creative bodies of work beyond the course. Students will connect the research they gather to their existing practice through an open-ended final project of any medium. Experimentation and the cultivation of a collaborative studio culture are emphasized in the classroom as students explore how situated knowledge, lived experience, and varying perspectives can be gathered, shared, and represented.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $100.00

Elective

What is knowledge, and how do we know things? How is this "knowing" shaped by relationships of politics and power? This class will serve as an introduction to the philosophical tradition of epistemology with a particular focus on critical epistemologies, i.e., studies of epistemic injustice, ignorance, and resistance. The course will cover some of the central figures and concepts within the field, as well as critical interventions borne of feminist philosophers, critical race theorists, Indigenous philosophers, and crip theory. The course will include long and short form writing assignments, discussions, as well as student presentations. 

Elective

This advanced studio invites students to explore how designed objects shape our everyday rituals of gathering, serving, and sharing. Through the creation of tabletop collections, students will engage in a hands-on, research-driven process that bridges form, function, and lifestyle.

The course begins with an investigation into target users, seasonal events, and market trends to uncover design opportunities. These insights will guide students as they develop their own collection, moving through concept generation, material exploration, and technical refinement. Each project will culminate in a curated “tablescape” that tells a story - visually and functionally - about how the objects relate to one another and the context they’re designed for.

Throughout the course, students will be challenged to develop thoughtful, well-crafted designs that embody long-term usability - encouraging students to create products that are not only beautiful and functional but also built to last. Studio work includes iterative model making, Illustrator-based ideation, and technical drawings to support production.

By the end of the semester, students will have created a refined tabletop collection that reflects strong material fluency, thoughtful storytelling, and a high level of craft.

Note: It is strongly encouraged that students registering for this class have completed ID 2453-XX Wood II or ID 2452-XX Metals II or ADS: Production Ceramics.

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

This course explores generative processes with an emphasis on visual systems, rethinking the tools and software used to create and distribute graphic design. Through approaches such as responsive design, generative visual identities, and variable typography, we will examine how the role of the designer has shifted toward creating systems of modules, algorithms, and datasets rather than single, static outcomes.

In system-based design, with its reliance on computational tools, processes focused on automation and efficiency often make it easy to generate countless variations without meaningful intent or context. This class takes that environment as a starting point, exploring how designers can respond creatively by developing form-making methodologies that bring depth and critical reflection to computational practices.

Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is helpful. Prototyping tools and languages such as p5.js and other web programming libraries will be introduced to broaden technical skills. Alongside screen-based projects, students will also engage in physical and analog activities to expand their understanding of computational design. Weekly student-led presentations and reading discussions will further expand on relevant topics.

Elective

Comprehensive design of building enclosures - integrated consideration of structural design, tolerance, detailing, thermal transmission, air transmission, and moisture transmission. Introduce typical and atypical systems of enclosure with emphasis on relative advantages of different systems depending on location, intended performance, and design intent.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

Studio: Design promotes multidisciplinary studio experimentation across an array of media and processes. Students explore the organization of visual and other sensory elements in order to understand perceptual attributes and the production of meaning. Using various methods of expression, students may create objects, spaces, and experiences that demonstrate their analysis of composition, color, narrative, motion, systems, and cultural signification. Assignments allow for inquiries into scientific, social, cultural, historical, philosophical, technological, and political topics. Critical and experimental utilization of design principles, which underpin all of the arts, are emphasized. Students are guided through progressive investigations, in which the act of seeing is amplified by the study of physiological and cognitive factors that generate perception. Examined subjects are taken through stages of representation, abstraction, and/or symbolic interpretation to reveal essential communicative properties.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

These three hot drinks with which we are so familiar became commodities and part of our everyday only recently. This course explores the values that were attached to these plants with a focus on the era of pre-industrialization, i.e. 1500-1800. We will survey their origins and their Western adoption by examining trade and colonial networks, medical theories, the issue of morality, and the expansion of sugar production. We will study how the craving for these drinks reinforced or even spurred slavery in French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English colonies. In addition, we will reflect on ritual and tableware in a variety of cultures. Sustainability, exploitative labor, and how complicit we are as present-day consumers is also part of this course. The methodology is based on the analysis of images and objects, discussions of assigned readings, written responses, visits to the RISD museum and the Brown U. rare books collection as well as contacts with local tea, coffee, or chocolate companies. This course is capped at 15 students in order to foster research and writing. For final projects, you can work either on coffee or tea, or contribute to Ethical Chocolate Day (Feb. 4), a multiple-activity venue. ECD includes an evening discussion with professionals enhanced by chocolate tasting; attendance to that event is mandatory. Active participation in class activities and completing homework is expected to pass this course.

Elective

This course explores the tangled histories, patchworked mythologies, and the global intersections and connections of textiles through the lens of INDIGO dyeing practices around the world.The textile histories covered will spiral through the centuries to the present day, and, through individual place-based case studies, will consider the narratives of identity, labor, and process they express well beyond their regionality. Rethinking the “History of” survey model, we will investigate how deep research leads to holistic perspectives as we uncover global networks of knowledge-sharing embedded within specific “regional” textile crafts.

These narratives will unfold from objects selected from the collections of the RISD Museum that will be made available for consideration and study at close range as part of every class session. The firsthand experiences will be guided and enriched by guest lectures and workshops by visiting scholars and artists whose work centers on the particular histories examined, as well as potential field trips. Through active engagement with tangible objects and exposure to a plurality of voices, students in the course not only will gain an embodied understanding of the global interconnections of textile histories, but also will find space for moving through and beyond colonial inheritances.

Textiles Students can be pre-registered by the department.

Elective

This studio course explores how sound can reframe interior space and reshape our surroundings. Students will create site-responsive works for indoor locations across the RISD campus, including lobbies, galleries, gathering places, and other settings. They will work with the IKO, an icosahedral loudspeaker array that uses beamforming, a technique for directing and shaping sound in space, to produce immersive three-dimensional listening experiences.

Through on-site research and experimentation, we will examine how acoustics, architecture, and social dynamics influence auditory perception. Shared interiors are approached not only as physical structures but also as cultural and behavioral contexts, considering how audio can guide attention, shift atmosphere, support gatherings, or provoke new forms of encounter. Discussions and examples from contemporary art and design practices provide perspective on sound as a spatial and experiential medium.

Weekly public listening activations will temporarily transform familiar areas into sites for focused listening and collective reflection. The course centers on a series of short-term interventions that reveal new auditory possibilities within the everyday interiors of RISD.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

In this course, Contemporary Ecopoetries: North Americas+, students will examine poems published after 1970 in order to explore how they encounter, diagnose, and respond to environmental topics such as climate change, extinction, extractivism, (in)justice, place, and toxicity, among other concerns. As the course title indicates, one grounding assumption of the course is that there are many, differently-experienced North Americas. Authors may include Sherwin Bitsui, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Natalie Diaz, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dg nanouk okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, and Natasha Trethewey. Course activities will include reading, analyzing, and discussing poems and critical essays, as well as regular writing assignments. These course activities will prepare students to embark on their own ecopoetries research in order to complete the final project. For the final project each student will produce a mini-anthology on a topic of their choosing that gathers, introduces, and critically responds to a set of existing ecopoetic texts.

Elective

Over the course of a year, senior students integrate their media skills through a cross-disciplinary approach with time-based media practice, resulting in a developed work or a series of smaller related works meant for exhibition or performance. This path is for students that wish to engage with time-based media in non-traditional ways, such as through installation, performance, public art, interactivity, intervention, networked/collaborative production, activism, etc.. Students research, develop, design, prototype, direct and produce these works independently. Students receive weekly individual guidance from the instructor and partnered peers. Class meetings are devoted to lectures, informational workshops, student presentations of related research, individual meetings and group critique. During Wintersession, students perform production work, test and analyze parameters and results. Students have weekly meetings for lectures, guests, technical workshops, and weekly small-group meetings to discuss their works-in-progress.

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Elective

This course is a practical and conceptual exploration into electronic sensors, processors and actuators in the context of interactive art and design. Students will turn everyday objects into ambient interfaces or "responsive systems" that respond to the conditions of the human body, data networks, and the environment. Contemporary works of art and design - from kinetic sculpture and sound art to installation, architecture and product design - will be examined through readings and presentations. Open source hardware (Arduino) and software (Processing) will be taught along with the fundamentals of electronic circuitry. Emphasis is given to the development of creative projects (individual or collaborative), followed by an iterative implementation process (planning, prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining). The course is structured around a series of tutorials and exercises, culminating in a final project. Students also present work-in-progress and prototypes during class reviews to receive qualitative feedback from the class and the instructor. Participants will engage with physical computing conceptually and technically in their studio work and are encouraged to leverage their individual backgrounds to excel in the respective context. Prior experience with electronics and programming is recommended but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This path, within the senior studio options, allows for the exploration of a broad range of hybrid practices. Through the structural support of this year-long studio, students will produce a project that synthesizes their understanding of and aspirations for media art practice. Works produced use media as their point of departure, but may take a variety of forms including performance, installation, public art, intervention, networked/collaborative production, print publication, activism, etc. The course prepares students to work with depth in their use of media and as contemporary artists in a complex art world, in which media is often only one component in a larger project. Students receive weekly individual guidance from the instructor and peers, as well as two critiques by prominent working artists or related practitioners. Class meetings are devoted to presentations of related artists works, individual meetings and group critique. During the spring semester, each student explores the notion of distribution intensively, resulting in the crafting of individualized forms of presentation. Each student also develops a portfolio of their work, focused on communicating their core interests to a defined group. Spring Semester features speakers, working with related practices, who meet with students to prepare them for their professional future.

Estimated Cost of Materials: (varies considerably with production design) average $1,000.00 to $3,000.00.

Please contact fav@risd.edu for permission to register.

Major Requirement | BFA Film/Animation/Video | Open Media

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon writes, "The relations of man with matter, with the world outside, and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food." Fanon recognizes that for the colonized subject existence itself is so threatened that every bit of food one can gain access to is, as he writes, "a victory felt as a triumph for life." The foods people choose to eat and the ways they prepare those foods speak volumes about their relationship to the land and reflect their history. Postcolonial storytellers, writers, and filmmakers use food and foodways as markers of independence, as symbols of cultural colonization, and as signs of continued deprivations. Through foodways one can glimpse famines, invasions, and historical access to trade networks, and food itself can even serve as a vehicle for communication. Since these stories are not constructed in a vacuum, they also can reveal something about what food means in specific historical moments, in specific places, and for specific populations. This course will look at the roles food and foodways play in a series of narratives from formerly colonized spaces. Writers we will read may include Chris Abani, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Elective

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA