Course Description
How might contemporary graphic designers operate at multiple scales with greater awareness of the discipline’s latent anthropometric, spatial, dimensional, and relational capacities? In turn, how might graphic designers more effectively recognise, and experiment with, our role in translating and reproducing such experiences or phenomena (including art, architecture, fashion, writing) into widely-accessible media at different scales and in multiple formats?

This course will involve a range of collaborative exercises, inquiries, experiments, lectures, readings, screenings, site visits, and projects, exploring graphic design as an inherently multidimensional and spatial discipline. 3D, not 2D. Graphic design as object, as projection, as display, as gauge, as structure, as installation, as sound, as architecture. Not just the X and Y, but also the Z axis.

The course’s subtitle is “Graphic Design in Space,” a literal example being Carl Sagan’s “Pioneer Plaque,” the sum of humankind and space travel etched in pictographic form onto a pair of 9 × 6 inch aluminium plaques attached to NASA’s Pioneer 10 probe on its 1972 mission to planet Jupiter. We will also investigate more terrestrial, yet equally literal, types of space and how they relate to the human body: letters, words, paragraphs, pages, screens, rooms, buildings, and cities.

My aim for students in this class is that, with greater interdisciplinary, contextual, and proprioceptive awareness, you will work towards developing what feminist theorist and architectural historian Jane Rendell has termed a “critical spatial practice” as graphic designers. Ultimately, we’ll consider graphic design as an anthropometric system that is not only orthogonal (operating in multiple dimensions), but also orthographic (interpreting and communicating these dimensions through signs and symbols).

Goals
Through lectures, readings, screenings, site visits, exercises, and projects we will explore fundamentals of reading, anthropometric scale, movement, measurement, space, materiality, sound, display, and finally “program” in its architectural, curatorial, institutional, and graphic design definitions. In parallel with the projects themselves, we’ll deliberately work critically on cataloguing, evaluating, editing, curating, interpreting, reproducing, and displaying the same work for public audience as web and print publications.


Objectives

• Build a greater spatial awareness as graphic designers operating in the real world (which, as we all know, is both physical and digital)
• Develop an understanding of the relationships between the human body, proportions, scale, movement, behavior, and the various spaces and infrastructures (physical, digital, psychological) in which graphic design operates
• Further our knowledge and experience of the many ways in which graphic design connects and interacts with related activities and disciplines including exhibition design, digital media, industrial design, interiors, architecture, and urbanism
• Challenge canons and critique historical precedents of how the body, proportion, and scale have been abstracted, interpreted, articulated, elucidated, and presented
• Establish various editorial and curatorial approaches to critically evaluate works referenced, as well as work produced in the class (by yourself and by others), in order to make sense of and present a balance of collective works and individual work in various published/public realms
• Define a personal critical spatial practice as a set of principles and methodologies to develop further into your studies and your career beyond RISD

Studio
This is a studio course, so aside from everything listed above, we’ll also be making use of class time to get work done. In both the classroom and in my practice, I define work as the obvious (planning, typesetting, composing, experimenting, testing, prototyping) and the perhaps less obvious (researching, reading, conversation, thinking, reflecting, walking). Class is a just as much a space for contemplation as it is for activity. (I’d argue that contemplation IS an activity.) Join each class prepared to work with all materials that you will need that day. Each week we will review what is due the next week and what you should plan to work on. Get to class on time, if not early: 1:10pm.

A laptop, strong internet connection, and relevant software including Adobe Creative Suite, Slack, Zoom, Miro, and Google Docs will be required.  (I’m here to help if current circumstances make any of these things difficult for you to access.) Related to all this, please read RISD’s Student Code of Conduct for Remote Learning.

Diversity
RISD is committed to Social Equality and Inclusion and has a newly-created campus initiative to support this (SEI). This is a long-held personal commitment of mine too: to challenge accepted design history and canons, and to embrace different cultures, languages, scripts, approaches in both my teaching and in my practice. It is important to me that students from all diverse backgrounds and perspectives are well-served by this course, that students’ learning needs are addressed both in and out of class, and that the diversity students bring to this class are viewed as a resource, strength, and benefit. I strive to present materials and activities that spotlight underrepresented voices and are respectful and representative of diversity: in gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, culture, perspective. Your suggestions about how to improve the value of diversity in this course, and your challenges to me as a teacher in an acknowledged position of power, are always encouraged and appreciated. See also: RISD’s non-discrimination policies on titleix.risd.edu.

Academic Honesty & Generosity
During the course of your work in X, Y, and Z (and in general at RISD as a student) you will experience a range of opportunities to be inspired and influenced by other designers and artists. While plagiarism with the goal of deception will not be tolerated, it’s normal to explore the work of others in new and original ways, and to express that influence through a variety of techniques—including homage, parody, style, derivation, and appropriation.

Citing your inspirations, references, and sources and giving credit where it’s due are ethical, political practices. I’m actually paraphrasing Shannon Mattern (Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research) in that previous sentence, and I’m going to further cite her below, where she in turn cites Sara Ahmed (British-Australian feminist scholar) and Kishonna Gray (Assistant Professor in Communication, Gender and Women’s Studies, and affiliate in Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago):

“As Sarah Ahmed and Kishonna Gray acknowledge, citations are a means of determining ‘who appears,’ who counts, whose work gets validated. Our citational choices have the power to build communities, as well as to dismantle and build and reform canons and disciplines. … Keep in mind that citation is more than just a bureaucratic obligation.”

We expect all GD students and faculty to maintain an open perspective towards these concepts, discussing it freely, and to use class as a safe testing ground for exploring influence, with the guidance of faculty. For more information, see John Caserta’s “It’s Probably Not Plagiarism.” Make sure you read through RISD’s Definitions and Rules of Academic Misconduct.

Attendance
You are expected to show up to every class and to be on time. Late arrival or early departure without my approval will be noted and may impact your grade. If you cannot attend a class due to illness or other special circumstance, you must email me before class. You are allowed one excused absence; after that your grade will be seriously at risk. Pending special or extreme circumstances, this is non-negotiable.


Process
As each assignment concludes, students will meticulously document work and upload to a Google Drive folder containing a portfolio of all of your assignments (in PDF form), as well as materials that document your process. It is important that you save all of your work and not just the final results. Please keep all iterations and versions of projects, sketches, process notes, photography, &c., as well as iterations of your digital files.


Backup
You are strongly urged to set up and maintain a solid backup and archiving strategy for your work—while you’re at RISD, and for basic professional practice in the future. Operate on the assumption that your hard drive or computer will go down, usually when you least expect it. You will not be excused for preventable loss of data. Truly effective backing up means three things: on-site (e.g. external USB hard drive on your desk for nightly backup), off-site (e.g. a constant cloud backup service like Backblaze, which I highly recommend, even urge, that you use), and a bootable clone (another local USB hard drive that you back up once a week, as a clone of your drive with which to boot up from another Mac, to get up and running  quickly and effortlessly should anything happen to your own Mac). Read more about this so-called three-legged backup strategy here.