Design Courses Fall 2020

Faculty: Jose Perez

This Sketching class is for the beginner and the more advanced student. Students do not need to know how to draw well to register for this class. Perez will take you through the learning process to develop the fundamental skills that you can build on and help you lose your fear of sketching. Students will gain self-confidence and learn the value of communicating visually by deconstructing complicated subjects and simplifying them to basic forms. You will construct underlays of rough sketches and be able to create a refined overlay drawing. Learn how to sketch in perspective and render them with a variety of mediums and to improve your hand drawings digitally as an outcome of this class.

Faculty: Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness

Introduction to theories, principles, methods, and techniques for industrial design in a studio format. Industrial Design was established with the dawn of the industrial revolution born out of the need to address man-machine interactions. Since then it has developed from the classic emphasis on aesthetic, function and mass production to encompass products from 2D-3D, systems, services, circular responsible design, and the respective user experiences. In today’s world Industrial Design entails many more skills, methods, and contexts than ever before, requiring the designer to be able to wear many different hats interchangeably. This course will lay the foundation for understanding this human-centered, iterative design process, which is informed by tried and tested design methodologies.

Faculty: Carma Gorman

Coated or uncoated? ABS or HDPE? Red or blue? Open-source or proprietary? Nearly every choice you make as a designer has the potential to make people’s lives on this planet just a little bit better or a whole lot worse. If you can’t articulate the theories and methods you’re using to make these decisions, there’s a good chance that your choices—and the designs you release into the world—will have consequences you did not intend. This course is designed to help you make more thoughtful decisions as a designer. It introduces design theory and critical theory. It provides examples of how contemporary designers are putting theory into practice today, critiques the politics of off-the-shelf design methods, and equips students to curate/modify/create a personalized starter pack of design methods that better supports both their theoretical position and their design practice.

Faculty: Kate Catterall

A Design course that offers students an opportunity to construct thoughtful design responses to pressing social issues in a structured studio environment. Studio course. Involves researching a contemporary social issue; defining an area of opportunity; and designing graphics, objects, services, and/or systems that respond ethically to the issue.
Prerequisite: Design 309. Design 321, 325, and 326 are recommended.

Facutly: Jose Perez / Kate Catterall

Studio course. Projects introduce rendering and prototyping techniques used for solving problems in three-dimensional media such as product design, packaging design, environmental graphics, and/or architectural/landscape design.
What is design and how do designers approach their work? In this course, students will consider design from a variety of perspectives; design as economic driver, design as agent of change, future-focused anticipatory design and design as research. A range of technical and conceptual skills will be introduced and students will gain an understanding of both the design process and the potential roles of the designer in society.

Faculty: Scott Witthoft

An applied design course for developing space and experience design skills. Space design is a skill that any designer can leverage to craft products, services, and experiences, whether those outputs are actual spaces or not. The class focuses on understanding the variables of the built environment & human behaviors. We will use low-fidelity and iterative prototyping to practice using space as a design tool. The class experience will include multiple, short projects with team-based and individual participation.

Faculty: Carma Gorman

Why (and when) do we still use Roman capitals? Why do we (mostly) use romans and sans serifs instead of blackletters? Why left-to-right, why flush left, why (sometimes) centered? Why halftones, why CMYK, why offset litho, and why Macs rather than PCs? In short, why do things look the way they do, graphically speaking, in 2020? This class answers these questions by tracing the history of Latinate (Latin alphabet-based) graphic design from the dawn of writing to the age of internet memes. You’ll learn the origins of the typographic conventions, materials, and printing technologies that Latinate designers use today, and become familiar with major movements, styles, and designers in the history of Latinate graphic design. You’ll also learn how social, cultural, economic, political, legal, and other factors have shaped Latinate graphic design, and how changes in graphic design have in turn shaped society, culture, and politics.

Faculty: Kevin Auer

This class will address issues involved in book making and book design. Students will learn the fundamentals of bookbinding by making eight structures over the course of the semester. Students will explore various methods of thinking and working that will enable them to find individual expression in the book form. Through a series of specific and innovative exercises, each student will develop a concept for their books and give it form through the consideration of various design principles including, among others, surface, texture, scale, shape, pattern sequence, and rhythm.