Ilona Gaynor is an experimental designer, artist and writer. Her design work focuses on examining procedures of power across a variety of fields, images and material forms. Her approach to design is to expand its scope by inhabiting and subverting its form, context, reading and strategy. Her work is included in several permanent collections and has been exhibited, screened, published and disseminated internationally, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Design Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Theaster Gates’ Black Cinema House, the HMKV and STUK.
She currently writes for Disegno Design Journal and has written across a multitude of contexts and structural forms: from published fiction, film scripts, narrative schemata and strategy to scholarship and long-form journalism, MIT’s Twelve Tomorrows to Dirty Furniture and Yale’s Perspecta. She currently serves on the board of mentorship at the New Museum’s New INC lab for design entrepreneurs and was one of the curators of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne. She has consulted across a wide variety of industries and companies: from Google and IDEO to Comme Des Garçons and director Ridley Scott.
She has taught extensively in industrial design, architecture and fine art in such institutions as the Architectural Association, KABK, Princeton University, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Royal College of Art, and she was previously a professor of designed objects at SAIC. She received her MA(RCA) in Design Interactions in 2011 from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Sir Ridley Scott prize for experimental narrative practice.
The 6-credit Advanced Design studios offer second semester juniors and seniors the opportunity to investigate product, socially responsible, and sustainable design; innovation through science and technology and other topics in contemporary practice. These studios are designed to strengthen the student's ability to conduct research, ideation, material exploration, presentation, and concept validation. Studios meet two days per week. Junior and Senior Industrial Design Students are required to take a total of three (3) advanced studios.
Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior, Senior or Graduate Industrial Design Students.
Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design, MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design
Spring 2025 Courses
ID 24ST-05 - ADVANCED DESIGN STUDIO: TO BE A TECHNICIAN OF INSTINCY AND APPETITE
LevelUndergraduate
UnitIndustrial Design
Subject Industrial Design
Period Spring 2025
Credits 6
FormatStudio
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
ID 24ST-05
ADVANCED DESIGN STUDIO: TO BE A TECHNICIAN OF INSTINCY AND APPETITE
“In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.” – Zhuangzi 475 BC
This class will look at design from a multitude of perspectives: tracing philosophical trajectories of design to address the idea that designers are not to be trusted; and that perhaps the very concept of “the designer” has more in common with the trickster, the pickpocket, and the sab-oteur with its ability to coax effects from the world, rather than imposing effects on it by the application of force alone. The Ancient Greeks even had a dedicated term, Métis, for this dimension of design, which is implied where extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials, linking the construction of artifacts with daring military stratagems, programs of seduction, insidious courtly intrigues and even the ability of foxes and rats to evade capture and control. Through a series of design workshops, thematic design briefs, readings and (mis)readings alongside discussions from external guests this class will examine the larger cultural meanings, material context and philosophical underpinnings of design: from basic language and semiotics–to cinema and fiction–to relatively small-scale industrial products and large-scale infrastructural and ecological systems.
Learning Outcomes: Skills in applying a broader knowledge and theory to design(ing), demonstrating elastic thinking to address design problems at any scale, storytelling and presentation; film-editing, photography, art-direction and advanced concept prototyping.
Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design, MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design
