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Courses and Seminar Descriptions
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COURSES AND SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS
monday evenings 1) The Art of Aboutness – 3 hours/week, 6 weeks Bring your world alive. Seminar participants explore expertise in looking and seeing, and study perception to find necessary vocabulary and speech constructs to translate into graphic thinking for conceptual communication. Projects include researching existing familiar graphic and linguistic descriptives and then launching an inquiry into unfamiliar thematic domains. Students take their outcomes into an integrated portfolio piece – developing an oral presentation, graphically illustrated and textually defined. 2) Grammar of Design – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks
Students delve into
pattern language, semantics, symbol semiotics, and sensory syntax to
thoroughly understand a systems approach to the underpinning mastery
of means and ends in designating design. Students design a portfolio project to illustrate their understanding of these dynamic aspects of design language and design thinking in executing emotive, aesthetic, functional, significant, meaningful and enduring designs. 3) Design Communication – 3 hours/week, 6 weeks
The portfolio piece for
this class defines client types matched with useful communications
approaches – from artistic statements, design briefs, educational
design, information design, business communications, social identity
and popular culture, to personal individuality and graffiti. Using illocutionary steps against the backdrop of a cybernetic sequence model, students discover multiple channels of communications to connect their intentions with their specific audience. This also applies in understanding clients and design end-user perceptions, values, motivations and cognitive styles.
Students design a
portfolio project for this class. 4) Anatomies and Architectonics – 3 hours/week, 6 weeks Purpose, structures, processes and contents are explored in organizations of architectures, artefacts, products, services, technologies and the natural world as a design science. The portfolio project in this class illustrates existing interconnectedness by probing natural, historical and modern approaches as methodologies to accomplish an integration of design geometries and patterns-that-connect. Students sketch from the AnDi Anatomical Collection. Students master form-giving proportions from organic, random, and stellar arrangements to Archimedean and Platonic constructs and Fullerine geodesics and tensegrities. 5) Dimensional Design – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Students discover the interplay of elements, principles, and relationship as form theory. This class also analyzes static and dynamic aspects of multi-dimensional design. A series of studio projects creates an opportunity for multiple portfolio exemplars.
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tuesday evenings 1) Design Inquiry and Research – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Understanding inquiry vs. research taps into the creative forces necessary for design innovation. Students cover many aspects of qualitative and quantitative design research – anthropological / ethnography, competition, eco-environment / green design, engineering, historical, M-Base [materials / manufacturing / marketing], personal contexts / lifestyles / health / moods, sociological contexts / trends / scenarios, service systems design, typologies, etc. The portfolio project for this seminar is an exhaustive single or combined research topic covering a specific design inquiry in light of sustainable practice. 2) Human Factors – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Students work from a context model to cover satisfaction, comfort, safety, health, wayfinding, and error and risk issues in highly interactive macro and micro product, service, and environmental systems. Classic HF foundation aspects of Anthropometrics, Biodynamics, Ergonomics and Cognitive / Psychological factors are explored as well as Cultural human factors. Portfolio options include multiple user-centered approaches to a project book on any of the varying topics concerning an analysis of experience for a particular design. 3) Concept Development – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Bring your imagination. At times referred to as Ideation, inspired concept development is a semi-structured process that is essential for enhancing the product and/or service design experience. This methodology uses Design Inquiry and Research and Human Factors as a basis for combining aesthetics and functionality into positive outcomes for multiple design solutions. The portfolio book for this class is to demonstrate progression from inspiration, inquiry and ideation towards a workable array of ingenious design resolutions with emo-rational appeal. Sketching techniques will be demonstrated – from mind maps, napkin drawings, oblique, paraline, partis, perspective, rapid-viz, to blow-apart assembly and rendering underlays. 4) Desktop Model Making – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks This seminar studio covers non-toxic, non-power tool creation of dimensional form as communication devices for concept evaluation, design review and client presentations.
Geometries and scaled
flat-pattern development are mastered for efficient desktop
fabrication of maquettes, form studies, white models, massing models, full-scale mock-ups, and sight models.
Students create portfolio book exemplars from architecture, artefact, product and sculpture. 5) Design and Development – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Seminar studio members immerse into a complete product/service design cycle working as a design team within a product development team that considers business, technological, legal, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing criteria and constraints for their Design X. The project is taken through historical, trend, competitor, material and environmental analysis to formulate concepts and create form studies towards a viable design solution culminating in a formal oral, graphic, and text presentation that includes an exhibit board, maquette/model, packaging design, and rendering as portfolio book entries.
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wednesday evenings A vibrant, enlightening, participatory course. All five seminars explore the interdynamics of people, events and ideas and the use of Precedence, Context, Causality, Appropriation, Foundation, Evolution, Innovation, and Invention as archetypical vectors for designing. Portfolio projects use these constructive forces to activate and create significant work today. 1) Renaissance – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks To innovate [innuo vates (L.), to birth a future] - is a dynamic of historical proportions. This seminar studies the context and conditions, criteria, constraints and consequences that favor a renaissance, a rebirth of our own perspectivity, capabilities and potential. From the Age of Discovery, the time of Leonardo da Vinci, to the maturing of the period – this seminar sets the foundational cornerstone for Design evolution to follow … 2) Windows to the Revolution – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks From Lucas De Nehou’s mass production of glass for windows in 1688 to Christopher Polhem’s mechanical alphabet to the Newcomen engine – the Industrial Revolution gets underway after Cervantes, Descartes and Newton take root in a new consciousness c.1650. This seminar explores the hyper-realities that drove the Age of Enlightenment into nation building, economies, and the prospects of individual emancipation from a fearful past into a hopeful future …and the problems and promises of science and technology – a material world of machines, markets and merchants. The foundational basis of western civilization. 3) Modernity – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks The sameness of interchangeable parts and photography leave a unique world behind for the promise of Modernity. 1850 is the nascent year as empires shrink and nations emerge, the countryside gives up its charms for problematic cities, and the individual can never return to olden ways, or can they? This seminar considers the dynamics of the precursors to the machine age and the expansion of design possibilities via trade, transport and time…including the contributions of Asian influences and the beginning timeline of formal design education. The Arts & Crafts Movement, Aesthetic Movement, Japonisme, L’Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Art Moderne, Vienna Secession, Weiner Werkstätte and the Deutsche Werkbund, Futurists, Constructivists, and the De Stijl manifesto play out their design influences in an atmosphere of major art movements and technological advancement. Essential knowledge. 4) International Emergence – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks The Age of Artefact yields to the Age of Production ... coincident with the Treaty of Versailles, 1919 converges with automobiles, airplanes, electricity, plastics, time clocks, ideologies and jazz (almost in full swing). The Bauhaus opens, Paris is in prominence, and Moscow goes modern to kick-start a super-century. Chicago and New York rise to the occasion. Style over substance, Madison Avenue, Art Deco, streamlined and disposable and obsolete dispositions. A naïve futurama before a tragic war and splitting of the atom changes everything - jazz goes hot, cool, then free. This seminar covers the people, events, and ideas that propelled past mid-century into the Space Age and century’s end via Memphis. Students nail down pop-culture, postmodernism, deconstructivists, and on to branding the blobject zeroes while reflecting on the Eames era. 5) Millennial Global Futures – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Volodymyr Vernadsky, Rachel Carson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Victor Papanek, Lynton Caldwell, and others of their generation were/are the visionaries for a systems view of our planet. We have arrived at post-industrial design…where to from here? This seminar extrapolates possible preferred futures and their means of attainment via urgent and necessary imperatives. Understanding Biospheric dynamics [stocks and flows] is key as well as energy-efficient technologies and carbon management. Design opportunities abound. Prerequisite: International Emergence.
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thursday evenings
Start your weekend with a creative mindset towards your future. Interactive portfolios can be Visual/Graphical, Audio, Textual/Journal, Travelogue, Video, Web, ePortfolio, or Multi-Media. Students may prepare multiple portfolios. Seminar studios are critiqued by guest professionals. 1) Portfolio Concept Studio – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Students have an opportunity to develop concepts and content for their mastery portfolios. This studio class uses a template of famous designer essential portfolios from which to evaluate, emulate and surpass in designing for contemporary and futurist possibilities. Students have an opportunity to study past designs and analyze aesthetics, functionality and materials as structure, process and content to reformulate practical approaches. Studio sketching is from historical iconic models from the Antropos Museum Collection which include daily artefacts, products, and packaging. Prerequisite: Sketching ability, Use of scale and proportion 2) Planning Studio – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Students rematerialize their designs with the latest technologies and life-cycle constraints. Students delve into planning the extent of content and context for their portfolio by researching and exhausting potential approaches, materials and processes. Iterations of mind-mapping and refining focus for the portfolio in preparation of the next steps leads to a confident foundation based on eco-equilibrium and sustainable practice. 3) Portfolio Layout Studio – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Using and departing from established graphic design principles, students evolve and innovate a layout for their portfolio(s) by translating their progressive mind-maps into storyboards. From executive summaries to bibliographies, sources of inspiration to human factors and materials research, tables of contents to an index, students create a substantial body of desirable, innovative, interactive and environmentally responsible work. 4) Development Studio – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks In this pre-production lab, students commit their portfolio design to software and a project management schedule with weekly peer reviews to polish out details. Practiced designers are invited to critique students’ work. Laptops required. Software recommended: MS Word, Adobe CS3 (Creative Suite 3) 5) Portfolio Production Studio – 3 hours/week, 7 weeks Students produce and expand their portfolio books, e-portfolios, white papers, web sites, travelogues, and videos with designing exhibits, promotions, and strategies for sharing their work and visions with the world – from Burning Man to Future 500 to Rocky Mountain Institute to competitions, conference posters, design prizes, galleries, publications, symposiums, tradeshows, including international global venues. Prerequisite: Development Studio. |
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TECHNICAL NOTE The technical component of a well rounded design education includes computer technologies and mastering parametric, raster, spline, and vector based programs. Antropos Design Institute, as a complimentary service, researches and connects students to local CAD resources at company*, community, and on-line offerings to learn the latest, up-to-date computer-aided-design programs and make use of 3D printers, CAD-CAM and CNC centers - at a lower cost, with time flexibility.
Technical training can
also involve traditional material and fabrication processes.
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