This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

Historic and contemporary industrial design legacies are contributing to changing our climate, threatening our ecosystems, and harming our non-human relatives. Human centered approaches to design and sustainability will not get us out of this planetary catastrophe. Many global Indigenous nations have urged western countries to shift their worldviews from individualistic to kin-centered as a way to prevent planetary disaster. What does this mean for industrial design which plays a major role in how our species interacts with the Planet? How can our design systems embody kinship? These questions will be the guide for our thinking as we seek to imagine and create systems and infrastructures that center the wellbeing of many species within an ecosystem, and conceive design interventions that support trans-species co-habitation of the world around us. This course will exercise students’ imagination as we engage what habitable structures could be that might welcome the insects, the rodents, the cats, the dogs, the birds, the plants, and so on. Students will engage a range of texts, media, guest speakers, and non-human observation activities to nourish their understanding of trans-multi-species design. Students will look at how other species design and exist in trans-multi-species kinships as well as other human groups who have been including other species in their systems. The course will result in students making habitable structures that take up the tasks of being trans-multi-species inclusive. Students will leave the course with an understanding of how the emerging future can be grounded in kinship designs, doing away with human exceptionalism. 
Key Words: Human Centered Design, More than human design, Design for Adaptation, Design for Kinship, Planetary Design, Global Indigenous Designs Thinking.

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

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design