This course introduces the Graduate Thesis project starting with the development of a research question through secondary research reading methods. This question has its assumptions articulated and verified through experimental making and primary research methods that engage specific audiences for qualitative discourse.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This course introduces the Graduate Thesis project starting with the development of a research question through secondary research reading methods. This question has its assumptions articulated and verified through experimental making and primary research methods that engage specific audiences for qualitative discourse.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This course concludes the Graduate Thesis through iterative prototyping, application and verification that positions and delivers a human-centered, discipline-engaging proposal that will be communicated through an exhibition format, product, product prototype and a final Graduate Thesis document.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This course concludes the Graduate Thesis through iterative prototyping, application and verification that positions and delivers a human-centered, discipline-engaging proposal that will be communicated through an exhibition format, product, product prototype and a final Graduate Thesis document.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

Graduate Thesis Communications II is a studio course run in parallel with our sibling studio course which focuses on completing your thesis. Together, we will spend the spring semester finishing the thesis and thesis book that you proposed at the end of Graduate Thesis Communications I. We continue to think about writing as a design tool and as a communication tool. For this course, we put more emphasis on the communication aspect. Together, we will continue to refine and strengthen the manner by which you explain your thesis to yourself and others. We will think about audience, voice, structure, and form. We will explore different ways of communicating the same idea in different contexts and mediums (visual, oral, written). We will examine how to share our work and with whom. At the end of the course, you will have a complete thesis.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

Graduate Thesis Communications II is a studio course run in parallel with our sibling studio course which focuses on completing your thesis. Together, we will spend the spring semester finishing the thesis and thesis book that you proposed at the end of Graduate Thesis Communications I. We continue to think about writing as a design tool and as a communication tool. For this course, we put more emphasis on the communication aspect. Together, we will continue to refine and strengthen the manner by which you explain your thesis to yourself and others. We will think about audience, voice, structure, and form. We will explore different ways of communicating the same idea in different contexts and mediums (visual, oral, written). We will examine how to share our work and with whom. At the end of the course, you will have a complete thesis.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

Graduate Thesis Communications I is a studio course run in parallel with our sibling studio course which focuses on design research methods. Together, we will spend the fall semester casting about, planning and prototyping towards some kind of design proposal or product for execution in the spring. We think about writing in two ways. First as a design tool and second as a communication tool. On the tool for design side, we think about the many ways that writing can help clarify and quickly test out ideas. We think about writing as a form of rapid prototyping alongside sketching, model making, etc. We talk about what writing is good at, when other methods might be more useful, and when to combine methods. We use writing to help clarify and crystalize the thesis plan. On the communication side, we think about the many ways that writing surrounds a designed object (as a proposal, as sales copy, as instructions to users, as specs for manufacture, as criticism, etc.). We think about the audiences for those various kinds of writing and how to think about what they want and need. We talk about the thesis as a tool for explaining the design but also as a tool for helping you advance your career goals. At the end of the course, you will have a partially complete draft of your thesis. which will set you up for an excellent spring.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

Graduate Thesis Communications I is a studio course run in parallel with our sibling studio course which focuses on design research methods. Together, we will spend the fall semester casting about, planning and prototyping towards some kind of design proposal or product for execution in the spring. We think about writing in two ways. First as a design tool and second as a communication tool. On the tool for design side, we think about the many ways that writing can help clarify and quickly test out ideas. We think about writing as a form of rapid prototyping alongside sketching, model making, etc. We talk about what writing is good at, when other methods might be more useful, and when to combine methods. We use writing to help clarify and crystalize the thesis plan. On the communication side, we think about the many ways that writing surrounds a designed object (as a proposal, as sales copy, as instructions to users, as specs for manufacture, as criticism, etc.). We think about the audiences for those various kinds of writing and how to think about what they want and need. We talk about the thesis as a tool for explaining the design but also as a tool for helping you advance your career goals. At the end of the course, you will have a partially complete draft of your thesis. which will set you up for an excellent spring.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

In this course, we will explore a series of making skills with a focus on prototyping for physical artifacts. We will utilize 3D modeling, 3D printing, simple DC and AC circuits, laser cutting, and sewing to aid in translating concepts to physical form through mocking up functioning objects in various prototyping methods (i.e. lamps, soft goods). Students with little or no prior experience are encouraged to join, with the intent of aiding in deeper explorations of creating and problem-solving. 

These rapid prototyping skillsets are crucial in the product design process as they enable designers to quickly materialize their ideas and concepts. By learning these prototyping processes, students enhance their ability to visualize, test, and validate their ideas, taking them to the next level. Prototyping allows for iterative design, where concepts can be rapidly created, evaluated, and refined. This iterative approach empowers students to communicate their ideas effectively, make informed design decisions, and to create more considered outcomes.

Elective

This design seminar provides strategies for advanced research, frameworks for experimental practice in design, and prepares students for pursuing individual projects such as a thesis and deals with a range of scales and contexts through a series of structured experiments and collective engagements in design.

Experimental design practices; refers to design as a situation that deliberately sits at the edge of discipline. This studio/seminar class encourages students to explore diverse contexts and issues through projects and texts that consider the impact of design with new technologies, material exploration and ecologies, economic systems, culture and society. We will explore design as a means to understand and engage with social order, to adopt an open investigative approach to questioning cultural products and practices and how they affect and enforce the perspectives; values, ideas and beliefs that underpin contemporary society in an expanded exploration of contemporary design and its literacy.

What opportunities can free thinking design practitioners uncover through direct exploration of the complexity of design’s role in developing political, cultural, economic systems and social structures as products? Within this class we will reassess the discipline, and reconsider the practice of design, free from the marketplace, but not exclusionary. Allowing an autonomous position to question and challenge a broad range of cultural phenomena, patterns of social interaction and the behaviors in which they are used.

This class will work across both conceptual and material experiments; from tangible objects and interfaces to intangible material processes such as the use of AI as a material exploration. The class will be taught through a series of technical demonstrations, workshops, project briefs, visiting guest speakers and external critiques. The outcome of which will be a series of products / tools / interactions that seek to question social, economic and political order of not only how things are made, but in what context, why and for whom.

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 seminar addresses key critical theory and socio-political aspects of illustration practices from a historical perspective. Reading, discussion, and meaningful integration of ideas into studio writing and activity are goals of the course. Class will meet two times per week including supported research times in various special collections and the library. Faculty determine the content of the seminar each term, balancing attention to issues defined by the expertise and interests of the graduate cohort and subjects of relevance to the field and professional practice. Theorists of special concern to contemporary illustration practice will be highlighted; statistics and technical information about communication media will illuminate how art objects have circulated in their own eras. Critical reading, writing, and presentation will be assessed.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $75.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In this class, we will explore multiple forms of graphic storytelling. Though the primary lens of this class is comics/graphic novel storytelling, we will range outside of that as well. We will work with multiple forms of sequential narrative, and we will also experiment with scale and medium. Can you make a graphic narrative that is tiny and fits in the palm of a child's hand? Can you make one so large you need to walk through it, be immersed in it, stand inside of it? Can you make a visual story out of jewelry, or clay? Can a room be a graphic narrative? We will hone both writing and visual skills to create narratives in all mediums. The class will also include readings in graphic narrative, and some exploration of film, from both a writing and cinematography standpoint.

The goal is to create multiple short visual narratives over the course of the semester, culminating in a larger project.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This multi-format drawing marathon and lecture course aims to encompass a broad and nuanced conversation on bodily discourse as it pertains to depicting the human, humanoid, and imaginative figures. That is: past, present, speculative systems regarding the human and figurative form. These systems include, but are not limited to: The Archetypal Body, Morphology, Post - and Transhumanism, Crypto/Cyber Feminism and others. Through weekly film screenings, readings, in-class longform drawing and group discussion our goal is to not only examine ourselves, but also the ways we interact with the visual languages we inhabit, the histories of these languages, and the ways their histories affect those interactions. Throughout this course, students will be expected to decode, unpack, scrutinize and dismantle learned systems of epistemological vices and patterns of colonial deference–as it pertains to the ways we consume media and ideals regarding the body.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This course delves into Illustration as a contextualized practice through study and analysis of illustrated exemplars held in the Special Collections at RISD Fleet Library, the Hay and the John Carter Brown Libraries at Brown University, and the Providence Athenµum. First-hand encounters with these materials and subsequent secondary research into the causes and conditions of their publication will help to illuminate the role of illustration in influencing opinion, and ultimately the shaping of societies. Seminar discussions will center on the nature of publishing in historic and contemporary contexts and consider the diverse ways that visual rhetoric circulates in culture, and is further mediated in institutional and cultural settings. Expository writing practice is key to this research seminar. Facilitated through our object-based study and under the guidance of faculty and Special Collections research librarians, students will develop several short essays and a final project in the form of a research document or format suitable for display. A final work summary will be part of a self-assessment prepared by the student. This assessment will be helpful in preparing documentation for the final Thesis required in this MFA program.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

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 course will deal with critical understandings of visual culture, narrative, and the melding of written and visual languages in contemporary graphic texts. We will begin with a study of visual culture, and some of the key issues, ideas, and questions that underlie thinking about visuality: its spaces and places; the politics of representation; theories of the spectator/audience; modes of reproduction and circulation of texts in the era of digitization and globalization. We will then consider theories of narratology, as they are particularly useful to a study of the graphic medium. For the final weeks of the semester, we will move to a consideration of some of the rich and varied criticism from within the field of comics studies.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $260.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In his 1909 An Essay in Aesthetics, Roger Fry talks about the moral purpose of art-to offer viewers the opportunity to experience emotion with objectivity. Rather than actually witnessing a terrible accident in a train station, in a film we are able to experience the event and its associated emotions without the urgency of response required if it were truly happening before us. We are able to feel and to observe ourselves feeling. While Fry was focusing on the experience of visual art, his description of purpose is precisely applicable to the writing of narrative fiction. The ultimate goal of storytelling is to share an experience or another world with a reader, and the focal point of that experience is the conjuring of emotion. This course will focus on the development of understanding and facility in the creation of emotion in fiction. We will address the basic structures of plot and conflict and move directly to the creation of work that will be presented in workshop. The discussion will focus on the writer's intent: their goals for the emotional and narrative experience for the reader.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course is predicated on deep student focus on social engagement and the societal benefits attached to their studio work. Students will investigate and critique methodologies of contemporary, socially engaged artists to develop their own progressive work in order to question and shift traditionally narrow and restrictive paradigms in Illustration that preference and reward the hegemonic at the expense of the progressive, dissident, and critical work needed to advocate for the historically underrepresented. Collaborative projects with local artists, individuals and community organizations will be encouraged and supported to directly connect students with local communities. Students will be required to present self-driven work periodically in response to selected topics, readings, and community discussion.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course emphasizes the mining and contextualization of one's own work as a nexus for growth through the active, ongoing and evolving consideration of your own studio practice as a topic of study in itself. This work will spring from and shed light on your creative intuition, processes and outcomes in a way that will helps you to communicate your work to others through language. In turn, it is hoped this voicing of essential components of your work will help streamline your practice and expedite your artistic production.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration