Design Communication (UCSD Vis41)
Both a broad discourse in distinctive design practices, histories, methods, systems, and vernaculars, Design Communication is also a practicum introducing students to one of its predominant fields—working with the fundamentals of graphic design practice and examining foundational concepts in typography, image-making, and complex visual storytelling. The hands-on quarter-long Genealogy Project will give students the tools to orchestrate information and meaning in compelling and idiosyncratic ways specific to their body of personal work or area of study. By working with various typographic methods and process-focused image-making techniques, students will develop the means to concept and manipulate form and meaning with a communication framework while also being exposed to the broader study of various and peripheral design communication spaces outside of but in partnership with graphic design. Students will examine their proclivities, background, and work (from their course of study) to verbally articulate an Artist Statement, which will subsequently be used as content for the course’s poster design project; affording them both foundational skills in design communication and an opportunity to deepen their individual genealogy and understanding of their present or future practice. Download the course syllabus.
Counterfactual Futures: Speculative Methologies (UCSD Vis133a)
Speculative practitioners in the humanities, art and design, sciences and technology, literature and popular culture have historically and routinely capitalized on experimental methodologies to expand the imagination and critical thought into fringe and outlandish territories. The intention is often inextricably linked to informing fiction, reflective and atypical design, scientific epiphanies, questions of the absurd, and, above all, provoking rational and stable beliefs about modern life. Perhaps more subversively, though, these habits of criticality are leaned on to expand our awareness of just how extraordinary and non-ordinary the current reality is. By shifting the lens with which we perceive the every day—remarkable, frightening, awesome, perplexing, unsettling, moving, and transformative ideas and situations manifest.
Counterfactual Futures: Speculative Design to Destabilize the Present will invite students to operate as antagonists of the status quo, or rather, to re-imagine and re-image the status altogether. Through a quarter-long project, students will collaborate in teams to produce outcomes that influence communal contemplation of the cellular to the civic, global to the galactic. Incorporating research, writing, and design, the subject matter of focus for each group may land in product design, fashion, popular culture, architecture, environmental paradigms, media, sustainability, and agriculture, among a number of any other planetary preoccupations.
Students will use thought experiment models such as the fictionalization of worlds, extrapolation, “reductio ad absurdum” (reduction to absurdity), counterfactuals, the utopian and dystopian, and other “what-if” methodologies to move through ideation, expansion, development, and final presentation of their inquiry and result.
Designing Urban Ecologies (UCSD Vis101a)
Most individuals, even the most intellectual, have trouble verbalizing with certainty what exactly the term “urban ecology” means. This is because, like “design communication”, both urban and ecology are enormously general and abstract buckets with which we can fill with several meanings, understandings, assumptions, and potentials. Even the faculty who shoulder a shared responsibility of illuminating ideas on the massive subject will approach it from often wildly different methodologies. And this is a good thing—for like all design thinking and practice, consideration of such broad topics is best experienced as a prism rather than as a one-way mirror.
In the most general and traditional sense, urban ecology is typified as “the scientific study of the relation of living organisms with each other and their surroundings in the context of an urban environment.” This standardized view of the discipline acknowledges that urban ecologies comprise infrastructural and interpersonal systems and networks—buildings, peoples, pathways, communications, and, to some degree, the natural world.
Upon closer inspection, though, the organization of these networks and relationships goes beyond the physical mapping of “contents.” The connective tissue of “the ecosystem” is a lesser tangible network of political, philosophical, social, economic, technological, and cultural complexes that pardons our reliance on “norms” and grants us endless potential in speculative considerations.
Design History + Theory: High Corporate 60s to the Digital Era
(Art Center College of Design)
Explores the periods of design practice loosely beginning with the high corporate 1960s, fringe design activity, continues through Postmodernism, neo-ornamentalism and concludes open-endedly with a real-time contemporary focus on new design frameworks, the renaissance of the design “agenda”, and the digital discourse, especially responses to mobility and data as new architectural and design surfaces.
Students are asked to respond frequently, through visual or critical writing assignments, to presented materials. Each assignment will provoke students to question established canons of design, to make arguments for or against their validity, to conceive of possible alternative or tangential histories and their applied value systems, and finally to imagine, unpack and establish their own design approaches and determinations.
Artist as Author + Other Design Modalities
(SCI-Arc)
This course introduces students to the fundamentals of graphic design principles by examining foundational concepts in typography, image-making, and complex visual story-telling. A hands-on monograph project will give students the tools to orchestrate information and meaning in compelling and unique ways specific to their body of personal work. From typographic structure through rigorous clarity and considerations of beautifully complex image-making techniques, the students will develop the means to extract and compose form, meaning, and structure that is superbly harmonious to their conceptual ideas. Students will use their own biographies/research/process/work from their entire course of study as content for the class’ semester-long monograph design project. From this, students will glean both a greater skill in the graphic representation of conceptual ideas, but also another opportunity to deepen their individual design genealogy and practice.
Unpacked: Artist Genealogical Studies (SCI-Arc)
Students research the 'family tree' of their influences and interests connected to their design, architectural or conceptual art practice. The “tree” should be far-reaching and complex, covering a wide array of cultural activities and issues. Starting with a contemporary figure (or figures) one relates to. 'Maps of influence' will expand to include contemporary and historical figures/movements from the world of art, architecture, product or interior design, fashion, film, music, performances, places (houses, cities, gardens, landmarks), books (literary, philosophical) and then oddities like specific objects, tools, appliances, personal experiences, etc. The ideas represented in genealogies should range from popular to avant-garde, subculture to high-culture, from popular to obscure and esoteric, and everything in between to ultimately arrive at a framework for a personal artistic agenda.