Humanities and Sciences

Building a successful career requires not just talent, but an understanding of what it takes to be in business. Business 101 is an introduction to the business side of creative practice. The course is divided into two parts: general business information, including starting up, intellectual property, and money; followed by topics specifically geared towards the illustration, photography, or design business, including marketing and self-promotion, pricing and estimating, contracts, and client relationships.

This entry-level survey class is intended to provide students with an overview of how businesses operate and the economic environment in which they compete. Its scope is wide, to provide a solid grounding in business and economics to students whether they leave college as freelancers, entrepreneurs, employees of art and design agencies, or employees of companies using art and design to create and sell products and services. For those continuing with further business courses, it will introduce many subjects that are covered in more depth in additional electives. Students will leave the class inspired to be inquisitive about the business side of art and design, and with a basic knowledge of business and economic concepts and terms to help them function and communicate more effectively within a business environment.

Communicating Your Professional Identity. Learn to represent yourself and your ideas clearly and confidently in a professional working environment. This course is ideal for those applying for internships or organizing job searches and interviews following graduation. Students will refine their resume and business correspondence to reflect their individual competitive strengths, as well as enhance communication skills as they relate to presentations, meetings, networking, and interviews. Additional topics include: personal positioning strategy, online presence, professional etiquette, compensation, and mentors. Guest lecturers with expertise in targeted areas of interest will be invited to share their experiences and review portfolios, and as time permits, field trips to local design groups may be scheduled.

This class will examine business and professional practices that help form the basis of a career in photography. The goal is to begin to create a practical business framework for aesthetic and commercial growth in a changing media landscape.

This course helps make larger impact by creating a strategy to further the intent of the artist or designer. The business value of design has been established. Design Thinking has been adopted into the arsenal of business tools as a way to put the user's needs at the center of the organization to create new opportunities. The design process has been used to solve business problems and tell compelling stories. This course introduces business strategy to artists and designers and gives the students the understanding and vocabulary to be involved in making business decisions and innovation. While the designer is immersed in the design mindset and methods, they are generally concerned with making artifacts (offerings, experiences, etc.) for a user or customer. This course practices applying these skills more broadly towards all stakeholders in a business setting including their non-design counterparts, shareholders, investors, etc., and considering their point of view.

The purpose of this class is to gain a more thoughtful and critical understanding of a brand, its history, current trends, social and ethical implications, and cultural context, as well as the brand's relationship to our individual and generational identity. We will explore sustainability and its impact on brand value, and what it means to create truly responsible design. Students will conduct and evaluate various forms of research and develop brand platforms and creative briefs to inform and inspire innovative solutions within their current design projects. Through class discussions of design thinking, critiques of design work, guest speakers, presentation and analysis of case studies, and development of branding strategies and strategy diagrams, we will examine how a brand is defined and translated through environmental design, product, graphics, advertising, and communications. We will work in multidisciplinary teams in a design charette format to created branded projects to directly implement what we have learned over the term.

Are designers business people? Business financial statements are intimidating for the left brain-oriented designer. This course will demystify business financial statements through hands-on work from a design perspective. Students will research and analyze Profit & Loss Statements, Cash Flow Statements and Balance Sheets of publicly traded companies of their choice. From this analysis, they will create financial statements of their own from models provided by the instructor. The course goal is not that students become CFOs, but that they are conversant in the language of business in order to thrive in a multidisciplinary team environment.

This course is designed to equip creative professionals with essential financial literacy skills to make informed business decisions. Students will learn budgeting, pricing strategies, cost estimation, and financial analysis with a specific focus on design projects and business operations. The course emphasizes the importance of understanding key financial tools, such as financial statements and metrics, to effectively plan, launch, and manage a thriving creative business. By the end of the course, students will be able to apply financial principles to their creative ventures, ensuring sustainability and growth from inception through to business exit. Ideal for creatives working in design, entertainment, and other related industries, this course connects the worlds of finance and creativity.

Do you wonder how great products and services make it to market and have impact? Who its ideal customer is, how to identify which advertising to use, or how online ads and social media work? Are you looking to obtain a strong foundation in marketing to get your messages out into the world? Then this is the course for you! In this class we will explore the world of marketing - the study of the business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to users. Topics will include how to conduct market research, develop marketing strategies, and customer personas, positioning versus competition, choosing distribution approaches, essential website functions, methods of customer acquisition, creating messages for audiences (including underserved), and measuring the results of your methods to adjust and increase sales and impact. You'll practice application of the concepts in a range of realistic scenarios. You'll learn how to work within a marketing team as a designer across cultures, within a framework of ethics and sustainability.

The skills learned throughout your education at Art Center are invaluable for acquiring a position in the field of product design. But in this extremely competitive field, skills alone will not ensure a successful career. Individuals who excel, whether as entrepreneurs, corporate designers, or consultant designers, have embraced and exploited their role in the bigger universe of industry. Designers who understand business, corporate disciplines and systems, and how design can strategically contribute to business objectives and goals enjoy rapid advancement and a higher level of career success.

Law and Business for Artists and Designers covers a full range of legal and business issues, including the language used in contracts that affects the license, sale, and creation of designs and other original works of art and design. This course will cover: the basics of copyright law, fair use and copyright defenses, trademark law and registration, maintaining trademark rights and avoiding infringements, and patent law. We learn how to file a copyright application; searching the availability of a trademark and filing a trademark application; how to get a business license, form a corporation, prepare a deal memo, and negotiate a contract; and how to negotiate the resolution of a dispute, a new job position, and a promotion.

This course focuses on the experience of a transportation designer after they begin their career. It will analyze different corporate models and look at how design fits into the overall company's business strategy as it partners with engineering, marketing, product planning and other key areas of the company. Industry executives will regularly participate as subject matter experts to give additional perspective.

Design is following the pathway of any professional practice, moving towards taking responsibility for the function at the enterprise level. Design started out making artifacts, then moved into design thinking, and now is at the juncture of getting a seat at the table in the C suite. This course offers students the opportunity to bring a variety of learning acquired from their business minor and design major and apply them to an all-encompassing portfolio piece that can demonstrate their potential for design leadership. During the course they learn from professionals that practice in the industry of their choice, consider trends that are impacting their discipline, and how they can differentiate in face of competition to create an ownable proposition. As basic competencies in design become standard for employees without formal design education, this business minor capstone places the skills of designers and artists beyond the context of artifact making and into that of creating value and impacting change across organizations, and thus across society. The course enables the designer to create a holistic business system around a design solution to further the intent of the artist or designer while harnessing cultural movement and sustainability goals.

This course explores the intersection of business and professional arts endeavors. It supports gaining a basic understanding of arts administration, strategic planning, project management, marketing, budgeting, fundraising, and leadership in the arts and creative industries, equipping students with skills to manage arts organizations. The goal of this class is to provide an understanding of how sound management practices can strengthen the arts.

This course is intended to provide an understanding of basic legal literacy and the ethical reasoning that underpins business law. How these legal principles and ethical considerations play out in the business world that creative professionals encounter will be explored. The goal of this course is to equip students with a solid foundation in the legal and ethical landscape of business, enabling informed decision-making that is legally sound and ethically responsible.

This course provides a culminating experience for Business Minor students to apply their knowledge and skills to an in-house business project or opportunity for a specific client selected by the instructor. Students will work in teams to engage in research, analysis, and critical thinking to develop and propose integrated solutions for the business challenges identified. The production of a recorded presentation along with written analysis will demonstrate appraisal of a business environment, use of business principles and the application of business coupled with creative strategy. The goal of this Capstone is to provide a platform to apply the theories and concepts learned throughout the program and complete the Business Minor degree.

This course will find students (alongside their instructor) grappling with human desire and creativity in the individual quest for friendship, sex, power, and love. Through reading, writing, discussion, and artmaking, we'll tackle important, if potentially uncomfortable issues surrounding childhood sexuality, intersexuality, perversion, pornography, prostitution, casual sex, acquaintance rape, dating, and marriage-and the ethical concerns to which these issues inevitably give rise. As an undergraduate philosophy seminar, we'll generally raise difficult questions rather than accept stock answers. Throughout, we'll try to maintain our composure even when a little vulnerability is called for and the facts are in dispute. The only prerequisites are an open mind and an interest in self-exploration.

This class grapples with the hardest and deepest of all questions: Is life a matter of fate? Is knowledge power? Is there a soul? Is existence absurd? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Does morality even exist? We will read selections from historical philosophical texts and address intellectual watersheds that haunt the modern mind, from "Plato's Cave" in ancient Greece to Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization." Above all, we will learn an Art of Thinking, in which there are no answers, but there aremoments of insight and clarity. Students will be expected to read difficult material, write opinionated papers, and contemplate ideas that can profoundly alter our lives.

What's the significance of painting as an art? We'll begin by discussing it as a triangulated force-field: One corner comprises the intentions of the artist who creates the painting; a second comprises the expectations of the beholder who views the painting; and a third comprises the unique demands of paint itself. These three vertices are connected by a long history of painterly practice, punctuated by theoretical attempts to understand, promote, and exploit both painting and its practitioners. We'll explore these powerful connections in an attempt to discover the center (or centers) of the painting-triangle. Special emphasis will be placed on the state of painting today. Expect a substantial amount of academic homework. Students will be asked to read texts each week, write responses to what they read, integrate their thinking with their practice-and, above all, get wet. This Humanities & Sciences course is an integrated co-requisite to the Studio Wet Paint TDS. CO-REQUISITE: TDS-342

Almost all writing involves some sort of narrative. So does film, illustration, advertising, photography, and fine art (among other disciplines). This course will look at narrative as a group of strategies that can be applied to various literary genres (i.e. fiction, poetry, screenwriting, etc.) or to work outside of traditional genres in the formation of new or alternative modes of story telling or message-bringing. We will look at "traditional" and "experimental" uses of narrative as used in language, and then try our own hands at writing through and with the strategies we examine (and, possibly move beyond them). We will also look at examples of work within the categories of Art Center's various disciplines to see how narrative is used in them, and consider what kind of recombinant possibilities might be explored. In both what we read and what we write, we will focus on four main narrative types: linear narrative, nonlinear narrative, lyrical narrative and fragmented narrative.

The capstone project is a manuscript that each Creative Writing Minor candidate builds and refines during a semester: A collection of poems, a short story or several, image/text hybrid work, a screenplay, stage play, or any combination of genres the candidate wishes to work on. Capstone Seminar offers the time, structure, support, and rigor it takes to complete such a project, plus the opportunity to engage in this process in community. Along with refining their own manuscript to its most successful iteration, each participant will be responsible for contributing to their classmates' progress through thoughtful reading and discussion. At the end of Capstone Seminar, each candidate submits a manuscript that represents the work of which they are most proud, or that they feel to be most representative of their arc of improvement from the previous other four courses of the Creative Writing Minor.

Introduction to Entrepreneurship Thinking of starting a design driven business? In this course students will gain an understanding of how to launch a start-up venture and how to create entrepreneurial ventures from self-initiated projects. They will learn how artwork, design and products are developed from the entrepreneurial standpoint including how a design varies based on the business context. Students will create a new company and will develop a start-up strategy and use the Business Canvas Model as a foundation to evaluate the feasibility of the company (ies). Products can be two-dimensional graphics or illustrations applied to existing product categories, new stylistic designs, entertainment or media properties, on-line solutions, product design, brand concepts or technical inventions. This course focuses on the real world, daily experience of running a design driven business.

For artists and designers who want to spend most of their time creating and less of their time on business issues licensing your work may be the right entrepreneurial career path for you. This course teaches the entire licensing process from putting together a licensing property, portfolio or program, picking the right licensors for your work, creating a licensing proposal and presentation, negotiating the deal, to managing successfully licensed artwork and products. Key creative content covered in the class include illustration, photography, graphic design, inventions, new products, new services, entertainment properties, character brands, print and digital publishing, brand licensing, and children's properties. Throughout the class each student will work on their own licensing project and strategy and create a final written proposal and presentation.

A social enterprise can be defined as a business (for-profit or non-profit) that dedicates the majority of its focus toward solving a social or environmental problem. In this hands-on course, students will engage with a suite of design strategy tools that will allow them to invent their own social enterprise and/or consult organizations on the development of new products and services that can benefit humanity. The course is a deep primer on the establishment and management of social enterprises, covering topics including the mechanics of social enterprise, business model design, service/product design for social impact, community engagement, and close examinations of various examples. Through the course, students will research the history of prominent business models in the impact space (sharing economy, one-for-one, give-half, micro-lending, etc.), create an intervention and prototype that tests a new model of impact, and design a unique business plan and pitch that will enable the long-term vision for their own enterprise to flourish. The course will also include guest speakers and critics from the social enterprise field, and students will gain context and awareness around the discipline of social entrepreneurship as well as a series of key methodologies that will allow them to be prepared to design a unique social enterprise including: Trends Analysis, Design Futures, Product Development, Service Design, Business Modeling, Public Speaking.

An entrepreneur is a true innovator, someone who recognizes opportunities and organizes the resources needed to take advantage of them. Henry Kaiser, the steel and automotive magnate, said that entrepreneurs "Find a need and fill it." Entrepreneurship is about hard work, reducing risk, and promoting a simple solution. Entrepreneurs have a "prove it" attitude and pursue a complete understanding of how their product works. Entrepreneurs leave nothing to chance.

LAUNCH PREP, open to all ArtCenter Majors, is a mid-degree class for aspiring entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, investors, inventors, makers, founders and strategists. This course will align your core prototyping skills, startup development tools and business expertise, helping you build a repeatable formula to validate and launch new businesses and ventures. Existing concepts and projects are welcome but not required in this team-based, interdisciplinary experience. Topics covered include: tactical research, in-person interviews, customer discovery, market analysis, financial strategy, intellectual property and scale with a materials and supplies stipend to cover expenses.* This class will help you build a practical plan with key milestones to grow your startup or business goals during your remaining terms at ArtCenter.

The class will explore, discuss, analyze, and compare various aspects of modernist culture including the visual arts, design and architecture, film, the performing arts, music, literature, and science and technology, and provide a historical perspective and critical insight into the political, social, and philosophical dynamics of the era, and its relevance to our current time.

This course introduces key concepts in global histories of visual and material cultures, with the goal of helping students produce creative work with contextual awareness and synthesis. Students will engage with a diverse array of texts, images, and objects to understand how creative works both respond to and inform social, political, and historical contexts. We will synthesize concepts from a variety of sources to build a critical vocabulary for analyzing creative works in their historical contexts, forming a foundation for students to apply historical and theoretical concepts to their research and projects. Students will improve upon existing critical reading and writing skills, articulating the conceptual underpinnings and implications of existing designs, environments, media, images, and products.

This course represents both an introduction to and interrogation of the myriad ways in which art has been historicized and theorized. Rather than presenting a historical survey, this course will offer students an opportunity to delve more deeply into key concepts, questions, and themes in the history of art within its broader social, political, and economic contexts. Though this course will necessarily engage global perspectives and themes, we will pay particular attention to the past, present, and future of art and material objects of East Asia in connection to this broader global context. Key themes will include: capitalism, labor, colonialism/decoloniality, race and racism, technology and discourses of innovation, and representation. Assignments will include brief weekly written responses to assigned readings, 3 short essays (2-3 pages), and 2 in-class presentations. Students will work with both the Writing Center and Library. Course Learning Outcomes: 1. Build a robust critical vocabulary relevant to key concepts and themes in art and/or design history, with an emphasis on decolonial and anti-racist frameworks 2. Analyze historical and theoretical texts across multiple disciplines related to design history 3. Synthesize core concepts from these disciplines to generate original ideas that engage directly with the ideas of others and communicate these in writing 4. Form a perspective on the complexity of a global art and design history, as well as media theory and visual culture, which form the arena in which their practice exists

This course will study the history and theory of architecture relevant to the production of 21st Century spatial and temporal scenography, urban design, building, gaming environment, media entertainment, and landscape practices. Through a survey of major movements in architecture, theater, media technology, and environmental design - from the ancients to postmodern and post-digital - we will study how the design and construction of our built and imagined environments evolves and advances contemporary society and world culture.

Beginning with the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and extending into the High Renaissance, we will examine the interrelationships between the production and consumption of art, and science and religion. How have the latter influenced the former? What roles have religious institutions and scientific discoveries had on artists and designers? How have artists and designers responded to the demands of religious institutions and the discoveries of scientists?

Students in the course will examine the diversity of artistic production (painting, sculpture, and architecture, among others) in Europe during the 15th to the late 19th centuries, a time of tremendous historical change. They will analyze the ideas and values encoded in the most significant works of art to arise from this period by considering the social, cultural, and political circumstances in which these objects were produced and understood. Students will explore not only how objects were shaped by the society in which they were made, but also how art contributed to social and political transformation. The required text will provide the chronological bearings, historical background, and images for the course.

Students will engage with the history of visual culture in the second half of the twentieth century, with an eye to how the conventions of artistic practice, its criticism, and its exhibition change during this era. We will consider a variety of media, including painting, photography, film, performance, sculpture, and installation, and will examine the shifting roles of each in the realm of contemporary culture. We will also investigate the changing significance of terms such as Modernism, avant-garde, and author within the social and cultural realm. We will remain focused on the always-changing political landscape over the past sixty years, including the trauma of one World War, the Cold War, the various liberation movements starting in the 1960s, the dissolution of the Communist Bloc, and the AIDS crisis, in addition to the ever-growing late-capitalist globalization we continue to experience today.

Crowds are typical of modern urban experience: audiences and spectators, commuters and shoppers, protesters and believers all participate in the logic of the crowd. But what does it mean to join the masses, to be counted amongst the population, or to disappear into the multitude? At the turn of the twentieth century we understood the crowd as a dangerous figure to be feared and suppressed, but now we seem to have new categories of both 'crowd intelligence' and 'smart cities'. How should we understand the aesthetics and politics of the crowd today? This seminar course will look at the history and theory of crowds, cross-examining the group psychology of the modern masses with the urban biopolitics of population, circulation, and complexity. Through a range of historical and theoretical readings, the course will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the crowd and its impact on our understanding of mass media, mass culture, and modern life.

This post-1960 Art History class intends to introduce key historical artistic movements, by providing contextual (social, political, cultural) landmarks, and by highlighting some major artists' figures (from Hans Haacke, to Sturtevant, to DIS Magazine.), to underline the ruptures and continuity of art history.All together, a constant focus on practices challenging traditional artistic classifications and borders--through appropriation, sound, craft or queer problematics--will be explored in a variety of manners. Through a wide range of visual material (photos and videos of artists' works, exhibitions views), along with theoretical material (artists' statements, catalogues' essays, and press responses), each class aims to give a broad understanding of the artworks 'intents and receptions, offering a good overview of high and popular culture at large.

Stemming from the ubiquity of "Made in China" in our daily lives, this course focuses on the history of Chinese ceramics from various perspectives, with particular emphasis on global frameworks. The history of ceramics in China spans 14,000 years and geographic sites of production too numerous to count. Ceramics are among the earliest human artifacts known from China. They have been a constant part of everyday life, ritual practice, imperial ceremony and global trade yet largely divorced from mainstream art historical scholarship. Aside from a few sessions devoted to standard chronological accounts of ceramics, this course is topical and organized around themes. This course's first aim is to give students a basic understanding of the technical and social aspects of Chinese ceramic production: forms and decoration of Chinese ceramics, the porcelain center of Jingdezhen in particular, and the political and cultural aspects of porcelain's consumption. The second aim is to explore how histories of ceramics have been written and consider the broader social processes that have influenced the study of Chinese ceramics. A central concern will be to reconstruct as a class the history of the study of ceramics as a vital part of understanding the "China" of chinaware more broadly.

Students explore how the aesthetic and technical development of the cinema (from its beginnings until 1941) established, defined, refined, and changed the nature of the medium and the way we see, in the context of historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic determinants. Students also examine the ideas, implications, and ramifications of important trends, movements, styles, genres, theories, and directors. Finally, through intensive analysis of the ways in which the formal elements of design of the image are manipulated for expressive purposes, students learn how to really "see" and more fully experience the expansive potential of the cinema.

Students explore how the aesthetic and technical development of the cinema (from 1941 to the present) defined, refined, and changed the nature of the medium and the way we see, in the context of historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic determinants. Students also examine the ideas, implications, and ramifications of important trends, movements, styles, genres, theories, and directors. Finally, through intensive analysis of the ways in which the formal elements of design of the image are manipulated for expressive purposes, students learn how to really "see" and more fully experience the expansive potential of the cinema.

This interdisciplinary course explores the dynamic interactions, exchanges, and conflicts that have shaped the Pacific world across time and space. Focusing on the interconnectedness of the Americas and Asias, and building upon our situatedness within the Los Angeles region, students will examine the historical, cultural, and social transformations that have resulted from these dynamic cross-cultural encounters. Through a combination of history, literature, art, design, and cultural studies, the course delves into key themes such as migration, trade, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. This course encourages critical engagement with both historical sources and contemporary cultural expressions, examining the legacies of these movements and exchanges in shaping international perspectives, diasporic communities, and modern geopolitics. By blending diverse disciplinary approaches, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the Pacific as a space of both conflict and cooperation while exploring possibilities for their practice in art and design.

This course traces the development of visual communication from the first evidence of human image-making through the mid 20th century, including the evolution of letterform design from the earliest pictograms into the Middle Ages and through the Industrial Revolution. Social, scientific, and technological development are stressed as factors impacting the field. Through lectures, readings, and assigned essays, media presentations, and exams, students hone their ability to recognize conceptual and stylistic trends from the past and how they communicated ideas in the service of education, political messaging, business/commerce, and arts and culture. This knowledge will help students solve problems in today's studio graphics classes and clarify the current influence of graphic design on how society thinks about itself and the products it consumes, plus the role of visual communications in politics.

Design is usually distinguished from art for its utility and the role it plays in people's daily lives. What happens when these works enter contexts of collecting and display like the museum? This course examines the past and future of the collection, curation, and display of works of design and material culture. Our work will involve visits to relevant collections and exhibitions as well as dialogue with curators and designers. Through assignments, students will critically reflect on current and historical exhibitions, explore collections objects collections, and develop their own visions for design exhibitions of the future.

This course examines the history of illustration, from the perspective of pop culture, by' joining the dot's' between Illustration, fashion, design, art, architecture, music and photography. Students will study more than 1000 images to re-examine how Illustration style, content and message has influenced and been shaped by the many divergent creative forces which combine contemporary global culture. Class discussion topics include: Illustrative innovation, Illustration as communication, and the enduring beauty and power of Illustration as an instrument for dialog, expression, connection and change.

This course examines the history of high fashion, from Louis XIV through the 20th Century. Through audio-visual presentations, the course will focus not only on the origins of European high fashion design but the environments, objects and culture within each period. Through quizzes, exercises, and term project, students will be encouraged to use best practices to relate historic research back to their own majors.

The course presents an in-depth examination of the complex question of gender and representation in the visual arts and other forms of material culture in Italy in the early modern period (c.1400-1600). In its exploration of women as subjects, patrons, and producers of art and culture, the course begins with an overview of the moral, social, and religious models of female behavior. We will explore the dynamics of marriage and family life, as well as issues of sexuality, gender, and representation in the Renaissance, especially the actual male and female roles in society in contrast to the ideal presented in artistic and literary narratives. The course concludes with a focused look at the figure of the woman artist.

Interaction design and digital technology are changing the way humans relate to everything, from games to relationships to work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object--beautiful or utilitarian--but as designing our interactions with it. This class introduces the industry's history, from humans' first tools through the industrial revolution to computer-supported tools of interaction design. Charting the history of entrepreneurial design in technology, students will see how their own design process, focusing on people and prototypes, prepares them for emerging technologies, social change, and the future of human interactions.

Offers a design history ?that repositions design discourse beyond the default Eurocentric, techno-deterministic normalities in order to reimagine? design trajectories that privilege critical engagement with questions of race, gender, access and worldview.??

This academic course presents an artistic, cultural, and social history of photography. Through readings of critical texts, slide presentations, movies, and a field trip, students will examine the varied uses and functions of photography. Themes include: war photography and ethics, the history of food photography, the portrait, and the pictures generation.

This academic course offers a thematic survey of historical and contemporary issues pertaining to photography, in the context of art and the world at large. Through readings of critical texts, slide presentations, movies, and a field trip, students will examine the ways that photography has been utilized by artists, journalists, scientists, amateurs, and a range of other practitioners; how meaning has been constructed in the photographic image; and how photography has been used in society. Themes include: new topographics, photography and documentary, the photographic archive, and the digital world.

In the era of digital convergence, video has come to represent anything that combines moving image and sound, providing legitimacy to all new forms. As the materiality and specificity of video and film has lessened, and as media, nearly obsolete, a consideration of its history and contribution to art is essential in understanding art of our time. Students will acquire critical skills through studying and analyzing the development of theoretical discourses that frame past and current issues surrounding the production and interpretation of the electronic image by artists. Videotapes addressing cultural, ethnic, and social concerns throughout the world will be screened, analyzed, compared and contrasted. Includes an overview as to how the technology has evolved in relation to creative output. Examples will be shown of the earliest origins of video art and "alternative media" by artists who participated in its evolution--which in many ways started as a revolution-- to the current trend of art on the Internet, cellphone, and VR. Includes lectures, readings, and screenings, including seminal and often unseen videos to current innovations.

This course provides a basic understanding of the movements, ideas, and events of industrial design history over the past 150 years, and reveals, through study of past masters, both how the profession has evolved to its present state and where it is going. The class will serve as a foundation for a life well spent in the practice of design.

This course will examine the history, evolution and significance of automobile design around the world. We will work roughly chronologically forward, focusing on two particular aspects of design. The first area of focus will be designers who were responsible for the development of individual marques and models over the decades and the traditions in which they were working (or breaking away from). Secondly, we will focus the history and evolution of particular internal and external design elements of cars themselves (dials, gauges, bodywork, colors, shapes, glasswork, etc.). An essential emphasis will be placing this design work in a larger historical context.

Humans have always been on the move, quickly or slowly, near or far, in the air, under water, on land, and in space, and for a million different reasons. This course will emphasize the ways in which different modes of transportation have come into being, how they have influenced the human condition over the centuries, and how our desires to get from one place to another have shaped and altered our historical and current conceptions of time and space. We will cover, but not be limited to, airplanes, automobiles, balloons, boats, walking, and extraplanetary travel.

Everything, and everyone, has a history that informs our present and future. This history stretches back into the past, and every history has its own history. The influence of science has saturated social, cultural and political life around the world for centuries. This class is designed to introduce you to the history of science and technology, starting in the 16th century and going up through the twentieth century and into the 21st, and emphasizing the 19th and 20th centuries. The course topics will be global, although with an accent on Western science and technology. Rather than being comprehensive (an impossible task), we will work through six specific topics. Each of these topics has a long arc and covers a tremendous amount of useful breadth and depth, as follows: Biological evolution; the history of scientific illustration; the history of color and color theory; the history of models (the universe, evolution, revolutions in science, etc.); environmental history; and aerospace and the Cold War. We will also have several guest speakers, and visit several exhibits and libraries.

This course examines the development of architecture and urbanism in Latin America within a context of significant social, political, and cultural transition. We will depart from the late nineteenth-century, a period of independence and a search for self-identity, and gradually move to the late-twentieth century. We will pay close attention to the dynamic relation of the tension in the shifts from colonialism to modernization of Latin America, particularly architecture's unique role at the intersection of politics, art, and economics. Topics will include positivism, functionalism, nationalism, indigenism, internationalism, tropicalism, utopianism, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, and Habana, and the university cities of Caracas and Mexico City.

This course examines the development of architecture and urbanism in Latin America within a context of significant social, political, and cultural transition. We will depart from the late nineteenth-century, a period of independence and a search for self-identity, and gradually move to the late-twentieth century. We will pay close attention to the dynamic relation of the tension in the shifts from colonialism to modernization of Latin America, particularly architecture's unique role at the intersection of politics, art, and economics. Topics will include positivism, functionalism, nationalism, indigenism, internationalism, tropicalism, utopianism, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, and Habana, and the university cities of Caracas and Mexico City.

This course will explore the history of technology, considering new technologies as drivers of political and social change, while technological artifacts embody values and assumptions of the societies that produce them. Since technology is both fostered and influenced by socio-economic, legal, and political contexts, these, too, will be explored. How can we think about media technologies in a critical way? How can we understand the ways they impact society and drive social change? How do they reflect social values and divisions? After all, technology reflects and shapes our understanding of identity, time, class, gender, space, labor, and politics. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the history of technological innovation, as well as various ways by which to assess the relationship between society, technology, and media.

This course introduces a selection of artworks and artifacts from the Chinese Neolithic through the present times. It is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of Chinese art. Rather, we approach the broad topic of art from China from the perspective of construction in two senses: material culture and material technology (design). Historical case studies may include: jade, bronze, lacquer, silk, sculpture, ceramics, painting and calligraphy, and architecture. Core inquires we will discuss through reading, presentation, and discussion are: How are material objects interpreted? By connecting the history of object-making to their social, political, and cultural contexts, how do we understand plural approaches to design and materials, including those beyond the canon, across time and in the present? This section of the course focuses on the later imperial period (ca.1000 and onward).

This course offers students a historical and analytical review of global developments in the designed environment from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The course explores design philosophies and the relationship between varying scales of design, taking into account their cultural, geographic, industrial, technological, and sociopolitical contexts. It examines building materials, changing conditions of production, shifting concerns about the designed environment's social purpose, and representation.Through lectures, assignments, and discussions, students will gain an understanding of the different historic period and artistic characteristics of interior spaces, architecture, landscape, and urbanism.

Humans are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction - the first to be caused by human activity. Extinction has been viewed in changing ways over the past 200 years, and this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to learning about the extinction process -- primarily from a historical perspective, but coming up to the present day. Our focus will be on the extinction of biological entities (primarily animals and plants) and how our attitudes and perspectives have changed, but we will also touch briefly on other systems that have disappeared or are in danger of disappearing: languages, technologies, and habitats, and what is at stake.

This class introduces students to the field of humanistic ecology - a discipline that looks to historical, cultural, political, legal, policy, and economic elements to better understand the role of ecology in a larger sphere outside of (but occasionally inside of) its scientific structure and uses. The class will include a substantial historical perspective. Everything has a history, including ecology, that runs right up to the present day, and looking at how our relationships with the natural world have changed over time is an essential way to understand the world. Humanistic ecology is designed to provide context for the study of ecology, and in a fundamental way, focuses on the appropriate role of human beings in its relationship to nature: what is ethical, or not, what is useful, or not, and a variety of other matters that should be considered when taking a fully three-dimensional view of ecological science.

This course will challenge students to explore the past, present, and future of democratic participation and civic engagement. Students will learn about how US elections have changed over time through analyzing the history of voting rights, civil rights, ballot technologies, media representation, and power. With knowledge partners from across the political spectrum, students will conduct primary research to learn about the contemporary landscape of civic participation in the LA metro area, envision the role design can play in the election process, and build frameworks and strategies for the future. Creative projects will invite public engagement in the political process through the creation of campaigns, collateral, systems, experiences, spaces (and more!) aimed at increasing voter participation in and beyond California.

One of the most exciting cinema cultures to emerge in recent decades is that of Mainland Chinese cinema. Mired in propaganda for the first three decades after the Communist revolution (1949), Chinese cinema finally found its authentic voice with the Fifth Generation, which emerged in the 1980s. These talented and ambitious filmmakers were graduates of the Beijing Film Academy, which had been shut down during the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and they were eager to tell stories truthful to the modern Chinese experience --- while eloquently using cinema language. The films they made --- such as "Yellow Earth," "Raise the Red Lantern," and "Blue Kite" --- were often banned at home but found audiences abroad through international film festivals, and the directors were lauded as auteurs. Today, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou are internationally recognized, and a younger generation steps in to try to capture China in transition. This course will start with examples from the silent era (1930s) and Communist propaganda films (early 1970s), then quickly move into the films that became international sensations. Also covered will be the art films of Feng Xiaogang and Jia Zhangke.

This course introduces several thousand years of the history of Latin American art (ca. 2000 BCE-2000 CE) with an emphasis on modern and contemporary art from the 1820s to the present. The course begins with an overview of pre-Contact cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes. Our study then considers the art of the colonial period to the independence movements of the 1820s, the Eurocentric academic art of the 19th century, popular art and visual cultures, and the rise of modernism across Latin America in the 1920s. We will finish our course with selections of contemporary Latin American art. We will examine how Latin American artists have built on the region's shared artistic legacies as well as adapted to outside influences.

Life in the 21st century (especially in Los Angeles) is increasingly dominated by a highly complex media world, whether this be visual representations, forms of labor and the demand to earn a living, the ecological impacts of media technologies, or surveillance, to name only a few aspects. One approach to making sense of this world is through the field of media studies and History & Theory of Media & Technology will ask students to consider what "medias" are and what they do, as well as to consider the connection between medias and socio-economic issues. In this course we will examine key concepts, texts, and art works in media studies, their historical and contemporary contexts, and in terms of their relationship to gender, sexuality, racialization, class, politics, economy, and ecology. By the end of the semester students will have a strong foundation in media studies and will be asked to do a final project that examines a key concept from the course and its social and artistic significance.

This course explores media representations of Asian Americans, with a focus on motion pictures, from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period. Starting with the silent film era, we will examine Hollywood portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans and consider how these depictions have changed-and persisted-over time. We will also look at the participation of Asian American performers and filmmakers in both mainstream and independent productions, including the emergence of an Asian American cinema movement and the creation of new or alternative representations of and by Asian Americans. Throughout the course, we will analyze the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in films while situating these works within their relevant social and political contexts.

Writing and written words are central features in Chinese visual culture, both as material and conceptual phenomena. This course introduces the intersections between practices of text and image-making through various sites of art and design from China and Asia. Through lecture, discussion, and practice, the course will study the dialectic between text and image by exploring the origins and early development of writing in China, and the relationship between word and image, narrative and illustration, diagram and planning, and visual and verbal communication. Sites include ornamental writing, poetry and paintings, sacred texts and monuments, political propaganda, and contemporary art through works by Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Taiwan). Case studies may also include examples from Korea and West-Central Asia. By considering the role of power, social, and political processes on the history of text and image-making in China and beyond, the class will explore a more expansive conception of design, making, and communication in the past and present.

This course offers an introduction to the historical and contemporary experiences of people of Asian ancestry in the United States through a focus on Asian American graphic narratives. Together, we will explore the diverse styles and perspectives reflected in a selection of fiction and nonfiction graphic works, including the ways Asian American authors have used the visual-verbal form of comics to engage with questions around history, identity, memory, and belonging. Alongside these works, we will also examine how forces such as migration, exclusion, war, and activism have shaped Asian American communities across various contexts, and in turn how graphic narratives can uniquely illuminate, as well as reimagine, the complex formation(s) of Asian America.

This course surveys international artistic developments in relation to cultural debates and theoretical frameworks that have structured the discourse of contemporary art post-1980. For each class a selection of pivotal artworks and/or exhibitions related to a specific problematic will be examined alongside a variety of texts, ranging from artists' writings, critical theory, to art criticism. Organized more thematically than chronologically, the course will analyze theorizations of postmodernism as well as issues regarding the critique of representation, identity politics, postcolonialism, globalization, the expanding art market, and the growth of contemporary art institutions during the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Stemming from the ubiquity of "Made in China" in our daily lives, this course focuses on the history of Chinese ceramics from various perspectives. Of the diverse types of ceramics that have flourished in China, porcelain from Jingdezhen has experienced the broadest reach throughout the world. A fundamental objective of the course is to provide a basic understanding of ceramics and to develop analytical skills and critical vocabulary to discuss material, style, and techniques of Chinese ceramics. This course focuses on the porcelain center of Jingdezhen and explore the nature of its global scope. Organized thematically and from cross-disciplinary perspectives, the class will analyze the impact of local resources, social organization, consumer trends, and interregional relations on the production of polychromes, imperial monochromes, narrative illustration, and fantasies and folklore. By studying porcelain from various methodologies including scientific conservation, archaeology, anthropology, material culture and art history, the class will probe how close observation of porcelain-making interrogate conventional boundaries defining art, design, and craft while at the same time challenging the whiteness of porcelain histories.

This course will examine significant examples of world cinema from the post-WWII era to the present. Social, economic, aesthetic and technological filmic intentions, shifts and compositions will be observed. The course will consider various international movements including Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and New German Cinema up to recent world cinemas. Through zoom remote lectures, screenings by stream, readings, discussions, research and writing assignments, students will analyze the distinctive traits of world cinema within the broader context of cinema history and culture today. This course introduces students to the essentials of film analysis, cinematic formal elements, genre, and narrative structure and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, and describe film.

This course presents a critical examination of issues, theories, and practices relevant to contemporary professional graphic communication, with an emphasis on design creativity and progress as rooted in artistic, cultural, political, economic, and technological contexts. The class picks up from Graphic Design History 1 at the mid-century Modernist era, examining an eclectic diversity of significant individuals and groups up to the present. Topics of discussion include Postmodernism, new media, and design ethics.

Introductory course providing a review of fashion as a cultural industry, examining the production systems and commercial institutions that comprise the contemporary global fashion industry. Students will learn about fashion through scholarly writing, magazine articles, podcasts and documentaries. This course aims to introduce students to different perspectives on fashion, from a wide scope of media sources. Students will work on a research project analyzing a particular aspect of fashion, synthesizing primary sources and scholarly perspectives.

Data are a tool of worldmaking, reflecting and reinforcing past and present structures of power. Data also script the future. Building from that premise, this class will explore how critical approaches to data can encode alternate collective futures. With a particular focus on the role of data in art and design, we will look pair key texts on data feminism and critical data studies with works by Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Stephanie Dinkins, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Los Angeles Artist Census, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi ?n??ha, Caroline Sinders, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and others. Students will codetermine the course's assessment rubrics, and will participate in the design of the class as co-creators of curriculum through student-generated modules.

Digital devices and infrastructures have outsized implications for collective life today. Like all technologies, they are the result of coordinated human activity that produces innovation through research, business, design, and daily life. This class introduces students to the anthropological analysis of these practices, offering tools for thinking critically about the cultural contexts and impacts of emerging technology. What makes particular corners of the world famous as hotbeds of "disruptive" thinking? How do online platforms shape their users and how do users transform these platforms in turn? How does technology reflect and inform contemporary struggles over race, gender, class, colonialism, and governance? By asking questions like these, we will develop tools for understanding technology as a product of cultural practice; an agent of social change; and an object of collective deliberation. Constructed as a seminar, this course will include readings from anthropology, science and technology studies, fiction, and other fields, alongside weekly writing responses and a final design proposal.

Automation" is a key term of the present and everyday there are more and more stories about AI art, self-driving cars, and, most prominently, different types of automated job loss. In these especially, automation is treated as both an inevitable outcome of technological development and a radical paradigm shift in the organization of the economy and society. However, automation is far from a new concern and modernity has been defined by the cyclic return of the automation discourse. In the course we will approach automation in a capacious way conceptually and artistically, and we will look at key moments in the history of automation from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, the class will think about how automation is connected to race, gender, sexuality, class, labor, (neo)colonialism, the planet, and what it means to be human, alongside technology. Above all, we will look at how theorists and artists working in multiple mediums have engaged with these development, and students will also reflect on their own relationship to an increasingly automated world.

This course is a weekly 3-hour seminar in which students build a strong foundation in the theories and discourses surrounding visual culture, mass media, and design. Rather than proceeding chronologically, students investigate ideas through a series of overlapping and interrelated thematics with the goal of developing frameworks that enable a robust and critically engaged media design practice. The course materials will address a variety of media and design practices as they intersect with key theoretical discourses. Most of the texts will focus on topics related to American and European visual culture, but not to the exclusion of other cultural and geographic contexts. Course materials will be examined from a variety of perspectives, and will explore questions of modernity, textuality, visuality, technology, gender, race, and globalization.

This course critically examines design's normative worldview via theory, case study, research and writing. Challenging the adequacy of modernist, European value sets for contemporary design, students will explore their own worldviews, and be confronted by those of others. How can a critically engaged understanding of culture and context equip designers for productively addressing contemporary issues? In what ways does a serious consideration of context shape our understanding of materials, aesthetics, or even design itself?

Ecofeminism is a theoretical, academic, and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources. It developed throughout the early 1980s from the environmental, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements; in addition to its primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminism sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy. Through key texts and art works, this course examines the development of ecofeminism as an artistic position from the late 1970s to today. Topic include intersectional environmentalism, frontier masculinity, witchcraft, Land Art, site-specificity, the Anthropocene, and science fiction, among others.

Ecofeminism is a theoretical, academic, and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources. It developed from the environmental, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements in the late 1970s and 1980s; in addition to their primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminists sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy. As quickly as the movement was developed, artists began adopting an ecofeminist position, producing ambitious, often site-specific work that addressed the systemic subjection of women and the environment. This course will use ecofeminism as a both a lens and departure point for considering new methodologies for thinking-with our natural environment in the twenty-first century. We will examine anthropocentric notions around both gender and ecology in order to call for new positions that embrace communality, intersectionality, mythmaking, joy, and reparative action.

This is a conversation-based Italian course, designed to provide someone with little or no knowledge of Italian the basics of conversation and grammar upon which to build. For those planning on participating in the Italy Study Away program in the summer, the course will establish a useful primer for the daily Italian class in Modena, and will include some essentials of "survival Italian," to make ordering food and asking directions easier. Class is open to all students. Benvenuti!

French Basic: A Primer Through Literature and Design is a fun, twelve-week project-based course, which explores pioneers in the art and design world while teaching basic conversational and written French. Through examples of the works of Sophie Calle, the OULIPO movement, to name a few, students will learn how to decipher, then bring to life the French language as art, and art as language.

Almost all writing involves some sort of narrative. So does film, illustration, advertising, photography, and fine art (among other disciplines). This course will look at narrative as a group of strategies that can be applied to various literary genres (i.e. fiction, poetry, screenwriting, etc.) or to work outside of traditional genres in the formation of new or alternative modes of story telling or message-bringing. We will look at "traditional" and "experimental" uses of narrative as used in language, and then try our own hands at writing through and with the strategies we examine (and, possibly move beyond them). We will also look at examples of work within the categories of Art Center's various disciplines to see how narrative is used in them, and consider what kind of recombinant possibilities might be explored. In both what we read and what we write, we will focus on four main narrative types: linear narrative, nonlinear narrative, lyrical narrative and fragmented narrative.

A fiction-writing workshop in which we examine and test how place, time, perspective, tone, and other fundamental narrative concerns work together to create a "space" within which a reader makes meaning. We will read, and students can write: Stories, comics and other image/text hybrids, branching or non-linear narratives, collages, and re-interpretations. Any might be written to be read in a book, e-book, chapbook or zine format; a web-based environment; or from a wall, as in a gallery installation or experience.

How do the stories that surround us-the stories we are always breathing without always noticing-inspire us, define us, limit us? Is it even possible to access or create speculative pasts, presents, futures by naming and showing them with our current vocabulary, aesthetics, iconography? In this writing laboratory, we will work to create stories that are both deeply human/humane and deeply skeptical of the assumption that OUR world is THE world. Students will write every week, first outlining a world they begin to imagine week 1, then being prompted to specify and complicate during the term. Through reading and viewing fiction, non-fiction, film and other art and media, we will challenge ourselves to see, and then see past, the largely Western colonial constructs we take for granted-so that we can get at sometime/place other meaningful, compelling worlds are waiting to be shared.

The oldest form of writing is poetry. Its ancient allure as a mode of expression is still strong, sometimes in spite of contemporary distractions from the kind of concentration that reading and writing poetry often requires. This course, which will be run like a workshop, will concentrate on the writing of poetry as a daily practice, where the various daily emotional, intellectual, and sensory experiences can be focused into forms that can allow raw experience to be synthesized into art. We will look into some forms (like haiku and sonnet) and methods (like collage, symbolism, narrative, lyric), and do some reading of poetries that exemplify those forms and methods.

American Literature as we now know it was in its very beginnings composed largely of the voices of people who arrived to this continent from somewhere else, as a political and economic refugees, religious pilgrims or captive slaves. Today, American Literature is still enriched by the voice of The Immigrant and/or The First Generation American, each of whom navigate geographies and cultural systems sometimes parallel to "native-born" Americans or in the shadows as invisibles/undesirables. Often, their stories reveal truths about the culture in which they arrive, and provide opportunities for thoughtful discussion about context, story-telling and the current state of the "new Americans." We will read novels and a memoir published in the last twenty years, as well as other selective readings from current events to inform our discussion and writing projects.

This interactive, group-oriented class will explore the writing of Black American women by looking at multi-genre work from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Students will read and make comparisons between texts and reflect on how the information provides a new understanding of our current historical era. In addition, there will be relevant cultural asides (images, articles, music, etc.) that provide different perspectives on the piece under discussion. Students will come away from the course with a greater understanding of how to read, discuss, and analyze literature in a critical manner, and, through an exploration and an exchange of ideas, deepen their understanding of the impact of race and gender on society.

This creative writing class introduces students to a wide range of "Speculative Fiction," from classic Sci-Fi and turn-of-the-century Fantasy/Horror to stranger, more contemporary work sometimes categorized as "slipstream," "bizarro," or "the New Weird." Students do not need to have prior experience with any of these genres in order to participate. Through reading and discussing short stories by past and present masters, we will familiarize ourselves with the various narrative and stylistic conventions of Speculative Fiction. Then, using the techniques we have learned, we will write and workshop stories of our own, paying special attention to the way the first glimmer of an idea-an interesting character, a striking image, a bizarre conceit-can develop into a story of luminous imaginative power.

A course in which we examine the application of comics language to represent facts, information, "the truth." This class 1) engages participants in a model research process and 2) develops visual and other literacies by immersing us in a medium uniquely suited to offer a meaningful view into, and connection with, other peoples' interests, histories, perspectives, and lives. Broad topics include Memoir, Autobiography, Biography; Journalism & Reportage; and Histories, Philosophies, Misc. Facts & Figures. Students will read comics/graphic novels and some theory, lead and engage in discussion of these texts, and make at least one "true comic" of their own during the term.

This course will engage students in reading and making comics, zines, and other systems of dissemination, offering these as a site for argument, for curation, where the maker can explore a theme of interest not just by reproducing their own work, but by collecting material from multiple contributors and presenting it in thoughtful combination. These kinds of projects: exercise writing and organizational skills plus critical and editorial thinking; inspire those the maker asks to submit; and foster/promote/demonstrate the idea of creative community, which is especially meaningful in divisive, distanced times. Students of all majors are encouraged to enroll: anyone with a creative practice, regardless of skill set, can work within this form.

This course is an examination of films and documentaries that attempt to depict and reveal painting, sculpture and other forms of art and architecture. The collection of films the course will study will be a nonlinear jaunt through art and architecture histories revealing the predicaments that face the contemporary art and architecture institutional models that press forth to consider their fields in a historical 'blur'; recognizing consciously and unconsciously the challenge of historical fragmentation. The course will explore the trials film faces depicting art and architecture; questioning what stereotypes may emerge or what beneficial information can be had. What do we learn about art and architecture from seeing it on film and what do we miss? Or, when and how are film chronicles, documents and features helping us understand the complexity of these fields or when and how do they misguide the viewer? The arrangements of films curated for the course vary from new world architecture to, realizing essential art and architecture movements, museum exhibitions, then to venture to a wide and diverse variety of modern and contemporary artists. The course will also explore films made by artists or architects who want to be in control of their work avoiding art clichés and stereotypes often circulated by a general audience and film world. The zoom remote course will be presented through lectures, screenings by stream, readings, discussions, and research writing assignments. This course provides that students will analyze the distinctive traits of film and the information it is strategizing or not, to communicate about these fields. This course introduces students to the necessities of film analysis and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, and describe film and the art and architecture themes investigated by the course.

William Shakespeare is famous, but surprisingly, few Art Center students are familiar with his work--even though his plays are among the most important examples of the possibilities of narrative and drama, of character development, of psychological explorations, and of the dynamism of politics as it intersects history. Besides, the plays are exciting, funny, tragic, and incredibly entertaining. They just require some getting used to, and that is one of the goals of this course. During the semester we'll read two to four plays and see various film productions of each. We'll look into the plays as works of literature, and we'll explore the interpretations given to each play by actors and directors (to say nothing of editors, production designers, and others) as the literary genre is realized as drama. This course is of particular relevance to students in Film, Entertainment Design and Illustration. There will be a short exam on each play and an essay due at the end of the term. There may also be surprise guests.

An advanced writing workshop that offers the time, structure, support, and rigor it takes to complete an ambitious writing project. Each participant is responsible for: 1) achieving substantial progress on a writing/making project (i.e. the first issue of a magazine, a web comic, an illustrated cookbook, a short story collection, a 'zine, a choose-your-own-adventure e-book, a graphic novel, or something else entirely) they commit to on the first day of class, and 2) contributing to their classmates' progress through thoughtful reading and critique. Student projects may be personal, or concurrently assigned in another class; the latter will require signed permission from the studio instructor. Collaborative projects between several enrolled students may also be acceptable, as long as the writing is divided evenly and in a way that supports the logic of the proposed project. In this course, the instructor is also a participant, writing and workshopping her own project at the pace the class collectively determines is appropriate for the range of projects proposed on the first day.

Students will learn a variety of short story techniques, including interior/dramatic monologue, letter narration, diary narration, memoir or observer narration, biography or anonymous narration, single character point of view and dual character/multiple character/no character point of view, with the goal of writing at least one finished short story during the term.

In the age of speculative-fiction trilogies and dystopian movie franchises, let us take a closer look at The Heroine, that female protagonist as old as Isis. We'll read the female protagonist, paying attention to the traditional hero cycle, tropes and types, as well as departures from these. We may re-discover forgotten leading ladies and meet new ones.

Arguably one of the most important and influential works of fiction of the 150 years, James Joyce's 'Ulysses' is also famously difficult to read. At least that's its reputation. This course is designed to be a guided tour through the novel's 18 shifting chapters, in order to unlock its humor, invention and humanity, and to help dispel its mystery. 'Ulysses' takes place on a single day (June 16, 1904) in the life of literature's great antihero, Leopold Bloom. Along the way of an almost hourly chronicle, the pages take readers through the inner thoughts of principle and minor characters, parodies of literary styles, critiques of imperialism, racism, and popular culture and highbrow culture. It does this while also mimicking the structure of Homer's 'Odyssey', shifting the styles of chapters and complicating the nature of authorship and narrative authority. Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann wrote that, whether we read 'Ulysses' or not, we've been influenced by it. This course presents the opportunity to see what Ellmann means.

In this literature class, we'll look at "girl heroes" from Antigone to Buffy Vampire Slayer, looking at what shapes our heroines, and how creators fall in line or challenge what mass culture tolerates in powerful women. Texts will be selections of literature (The Metamorphoses, Antigone, The Hunger Games, The Power), and media (Buffy, Miss Americana, Charlie's Angels etc.), and also critical essays by Carina Chocano, and Emily Naussbaum, among others.

Where exactly should a story begin? Does the last and final scene seem inevitable? What belongs in the middle? Every fiction writer has questions like these at one time or another. In this creative writing workshop you'll look for answers by exploring short stories by contemporary writers and by workshopping your own pieces. We'll look at various avenues, including some nonfiction, for what's needed to establish a solid foundation for a story. By the end of the course you should have a much better understanding of how basic points of structure in a story change how we receive a piece of writing. Students should have experience writing short stories.

This course looks at various forms of translations and variations on several themes in literature and art; from the classics (Anne Carson on poems by Sappho), to indigenous literature (Joy Harjo's compendium of contemporary native poetry), to moments in film (Jean Cocteau's Beauty & The Beast, Krystof Zieslowski's translation of the 10 commandments in his television series: "Decalogue"), to music (jazz singer Esperanza Spalding's interpretation of William Blake's "Little Fly," and art (painters Cy Twombly, Edith Schloss, and William Kentridge on mythology). It will offer students the opportunity to not only try their hand at translating for their final project, but also explore how it might alter their concept of design as a translation of a primary source.

This course has you consider children's literature and asks you to write fiction or non-fiction for children. You need not be a writer to take this course--you learn by doing. We will read and analyze stories for children, ranging from myths to modern works, from young children to young adults. We will examine narrative structure and some of the basic requirements for writing books for publication. You should leave the course with a better understanding of the role literature for children plays in their lives, and how to create it.

In the middle of the 19th Century, before the Civil War, America was in a state of dynamic, nation-defining flux. In the midst of the political turmoil and his own, personal tumult, Herman Melville produced the definitive novel of the American 19th Century, Moby Dick. And while the book is famous for its obsessive, maniacal central figure, Captain Ahab and his relentless hunt for the monstrous white whale that took off his leg, Melville wove into the adventure story the conflicts of race, power, industrialization and colonialism that were, and, some would argue, still are at the core of American life. This course will explore Moby Dick as a work of literature and as a record of its historical moment.

Much of today's popular storytelling is informed by genre conventions that originated in literature more than 100 years ago, specifically (and chronologically) in Gothic, Detective, and Sci-Fi novels and short stories. Understanding the "language" of these genres makes us more fluent and adept contemporary storytellers, and can inspire us to innovate, to create something new. This class will define, track, and evaluate conventions in these genres through to the present day, attending especially to texts that combine tropes from more than one kind of story. Students will generate critical and creative responses to the material covered in class.

This course is for advanced students, fifth term or higher, and has as its ultimate objective the production of a viable chapbook / zine. During the course of the semester, students will not only need to design and produce a book, but work with an editor and an author, read deeply into the text to find meaningful ways (as opposed to solely decorative ways) to graphically represent the text, and study the historical and literary ground from which the text comes as one way of discovering its meaning. In this way, we will begin to make solid connections between the graphic and the literary arts while embracing several departments, creating collaborative projects between writers and the practitioners of ACCD's various disciplines.

More than 700 years ago, a man from the Italian city of Florence, pretty much on his own, invented the idea of creating characters based (somewhat) on his own life experiences. His name was Dante Alighieri, and he became so important to the development of European literature that we have come to know him simply by his first name, Dante. The story he told was of a single person's journey through the Medieval Catholic Otherworld, that is, a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He called his work a comedy (Commedia in Italian) and his first biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio (arguably the inventor of the novel as a literary form), pronounced the work "Divine." Since then, the whole trilogy has been know as the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia, in Italian.) In this course we will closely read the first book of the Commedia, Hell (L'Inferno) in which the main character, also called Dante, is guided through the horrors of Hell by the Roman poet Virgil. The journey is surreal, horrifying, sometimes funny, often touching. It is also, in addition to being one of the great stories, an encyclopedia, into which the author Dante poured all his knowledge of the 14th century world: spiritual, psychological, philosophical, political, astrological and scientific. The Inferno has been an inspiration for artists, writers, musicians, theologians and scholars for almost as long as it's existed. Together we'll delve into the strange, dreamlike, always exciting world that Dante created. The gates of Hell, according to Dante, have an inscription that ends with the famous sentence, "Abandon all hope you who enter." In this course we'll keep hope alive as we lower ourselves into the inferno with one of humanity's great and compelling poets.

Whether your interests lie in narrative, in archetype, in religion, in social and political organization, or in the development of "Western" ethics and mores, the collection of works that contain what we think of as mythology are indispensable resources to understanding some of the base material from which emerged European/American civilization. In this course we will read some of the major works of Greek and Roman "mythological" writing, as well as look into the historical contexts that helped to create the stories that continue to vibrate in the imaginations of we who are almost 3,000 years removed from the oldest of the texts.

C.S. Lewis called fairytales "lies breathed through silver." This certainly evokes the beauty, extravagance and simplicity, the imagistic power of these stories. But what we all know about fairytales is that they are not lies at all; they reveal truth. Also: secrets, fears, archetypes, problematic gender models, reflections of culture. In this class, we will delve into fairyland, places of magic and transformations of ordinary people. From the "old wives' tales" brewed in, as Tolkien put it, a "cauldron of story," to the printed standards of the Grimm Brother's, to modern literary retellings by Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, and yes of course, Disney. We'll use all these modes to try to make sense of what is essential to these tales-to find the bones of story, and then, the fat and meat made by subjectivity and culture, and then, the heart and the brain, the psychology, the silver and the lies of these tales. The classwork will consist of reading response analysis and also, writing our own versions of tales, spinning and weaving and making anew from what we've learned.

Warty-nosed hags, seductresses, demon queens, teen heroes, Instagram celebrities? This class examines literature's cultural imagination of witches connected with (falsely) accused or practicing witches throughout history. Real, imagined, Othered, and murdered, the witch is a multiform phantasm with one constancy over thousands of years: the witch has power. This course studies classical representations of witchy women-- Circe and Medea, Shakespeare's witches in Macbeth-and witch history: American and European witches and witch hunting, witches of the Caribbean and African diaspora, Victorian gothic romances, and 20th/21st century witches in literature, film, television, and social media.

Since Dracula (1931), vampires have been a key figure in the horror genre, but much like the myth itself of the demon that appears human, secretly feeding off society, the vampire has lurked and stalked romance, action flicks, teen soap operas, and "peak" TV dramas. How can one figure be a metaphor for animal appetite, dark masculinity, illness, addiction, queerness, race, class warfare, and vegetarianism? Sometimes all at once? This class examines the vampire from 19 century literature through contemporary interpretations, with texts such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, Bram Stroker's Dracula, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and film and TV like True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade, The Hunger, and whether we like it or not.Twilight.

This course is an in-depth auteur study of one of the most influential filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vogue or French New Wave and his influence on art, cinema, and critical thinking since his career began to the present day. Topics include Godard's defiance of the conventions of Hollywood, his radical and unambiguously political understanding of film history, his economic and cultural views, his scholarly interpretations of philosophy and cinema, his participation in film studies and film theory, and his thought-provoking associations between painting, poetry, and cinema.

This course is a comprehensive study of Italian Neo Realism: cinema's power to obsess and to convey the socio-economic, psychological, and political realities of the post WWII era, as well as its influence on new cinema and cultural politics. Visconti's influence on world cinema remains a major voice in style and rhetoric, as it influenced the work of Godard, Fassbinder, Scorsese, and countless others.

An in-depth look at the films of Ranier Fassbinder: director, screenwriter, actor, and one of the most important figures in New German Cinema.

This course examines the vast maze of social, political, and psychological subjects Kubrick's films tour within their stylistic and conceptual density. We will track recurrences and parallels between films, focusing on their historical and theoretical subtext, in order to clarify the nature of his cinematic universe.

This course looks at the key elements that go into creating a successful screenplay, among them character, conflict, and three-act structure. Weekly writing exercises reinforce the information introduced in class, and film clips open up discussion about the good and the bad of screenwriting. Film business professionals who visit will add to students' knowledge base, and course take-aways.

A Study of Modernity and Its Discontents. This course is an auteur study in which we consider Antonioni's challenges to traditional approaches to storytelling, cinema, and realism in favor of intellectual contemplation and political thoughtfulness. Starting with his earlier neo-realist films, the course will move throughout his 45-year career to consider his use of action, image, radical narrative, disconnected events, experimental color, and documentary.

This course is an auteur study of the films of Michael Haneke, one of the most important directors working in Europe today. The course will consider and debate the world view of Haneke's films that frequently interrogate prevailing contemporary ethical dilemmas with precise transparency and uncompromising observation. The course will reflect on why Hollywood in its monolithic denotation does not know how to interpret and consider these films, yet, film history, criticism and reputable film juries across the world esteem this work with their highest honors. Topics that the course will cover include the misfortunes and barren nihilism that Haneke's political and philosophical considerations will be examined. A chronological selection of films will be viewed representing categories and interests that concern Haneke's themes. Discussions, readings and research papers are organized to develop the student's interests in visual culture alongside their own developing visual production.

This course is a comprehensive meta-generic study of the world's largest producers of films, India. The purpose of study is to consider the development of world cinema as well as examine topics of colonialism to globalization facing the nation, its varying regions, the world and the individual. Topics include an examination of India's film history paralleling European cinema of the 20th ca. and its development of genres, and following up to today's hyper-production of the mirror Hollywood imaging Bollywood. Issues facing the individual, gender and the multi-culture within will be considered as the country was colonized, and then how the country moved away from that space into achieving their own identity. In addition, we will study the new challenges and conflicts the country faced over the decades after independence and how it continues to play a vast role in the globalizing world. Some of the filmmakers we will study include Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul, Mira Nair and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. In addition, the course will examine films of India's relationship to literature, art, and other cultural elements of India as it is explored in the variety of films selected. Along with lectures, the class will view and discuss a precise curation of India's films. Discussions, readings and research papers are organized to develop the student's interests in visual culture alongside their own developing visual production.

Comprehensive study of the social, economic, political and formal complex cinema of Robert Bresson. Analysis of cinema in the tradition of auteur study.

This course is not a production film class, but a course that composites possibilities of how to view and interpret an Alfred Hitchcock film, (or a film/sign), alongside an immense history of theoretical and critical writings. The course examines authorship, spectatorship, and identity together with other issues of reflexive film, and film's relationship to issues in painting, theatre, architecture, opera, music and sound, and literature. We view and research Hitchcock?s films by the use of multiple lenses including an expressionist's lens, a surrealist lens/or a psychoanalytical lens, a surveillance/voyeur lens, a semiotic lens, supported by readings by Raymond Bellour, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Delueze, William Rothman, Leland Pougue, Fredric Jameson and others. The course also examines the political and social atmospheres of the times in which the films were made, and identifies the filmographies' affect/effect, its pop cultural manifestation and influence. In connection, the course explores Hitchcock's universal themes, clarifies Hitchcockian space, suspense, objects and the use of the McGuffin, and distinguishes his use of Hamlet persuaded theatre. Starting with the Pleasure Garden in 1927 and ending with Family Plot in 1976, the director made 59 full-length films and scores of television 1/2 hours plots that locate characters in a fear constructed social system.

This academic course probes meticulously the social, economic, political and naturalistic cinema of the Belgium brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. The Dardenne Brothers, writers, directors and producers have created a notable body of work to include documentary works and their narrative poetic realism. This courses fits into the analysis of cinema in the tradition of auteur study. That being a very important structure to study theoretical and formal issues of cinema via the chronological analysis of a body of work to observe and consider how a body of work takes place over a long period of time and to observe how its text influences and parallels history. The course will investigate The Dardenne Brothers magnum opus to include Rosetta, 1999, The Son, 2002 and several of their documentary works that come prior to their notable success in their narrative work. Issues of work, European economics along with political oversight of the individual immersed in social structures will be studied as they reveal themselves through the brother's cinematic form and language. The course will draw from issues in the ethics of structuring the documentary and its boundaries that lead such attempts at realism to confront or be uttered forth with visual poetics.

This course is an examination of films and documentaries that attempt to depict and reveal 20th and 21st fashion designers and the impact they have on our times. The collection of films the course will study will be a nonlinear promenade through design histories revealing the predicaments that face contemporary society and their implications of identity amidst globalization. The course will explore the trials film faces depicting fashion questioning what typecasts may emerge or what advantageous information is revealed. Films curated for the course vary from new world fashion, to popular movements and films that set trends, to first collections at the helm of major fashion houses, to tongue-in-cheek mockery of the fashion industry all realizing vital design production needs and developments. The zoom remote course will be presented through lectures, screenings by stream, readings, discussions, and research writing assignments. This course provides that students will analyze the distinctive traits of film that can or cannot communicate the complications and details of design. This course introduces students to the necessities of film analysis and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, and describe film and design themes investigated by the course.

This course is an examination and overview of the histories of film comedy deliberating from its roots in ancient Greece and early vaudeville to the present day. The course will consider various comedic structures, traditions and periods, spanning Commedia Dell'Arte, burlesque, clowning, vaudeville, cabaret, silent film, slapstick, parody, anarchic comedy, black comedy, screwball, action, standup, television, sci-fi comedy, romantic comedy to present-day You-Tube, Tik-Tok and other online tendencies. Social, political and philosophical meanings and intentions will be considered. The zoom remote course will be presented through lectures, screenings by stream, readings, discussions, and research writing assignments. This course provides that students will analyze the distinctive traits of film comedy today within the broader context of cinema history and comedy history. This course introduces students to the essentials of film analysis, cinematic formal elements, genre, and narrative structure and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, and describe film.

This course will examine significant examples of world cinema from the post-WWII era to the present. Social, economic, aesthetic and technological filmic intentions, shifts and compositions will be observed. The course will consider various international movements including Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and New German Cinema up to recent world cinemas. Through zoom remote lectures, screenings by stream, readings, discussions, research and writing assignments, students will analyze the distinctive traits of world cinema within the broader context of cinema history and culture today. This course introduces students to the essentials of film analysis, cinematic formal elements, genre, and narrative structure and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, and describe film.

An advanced argument-writing class in which students will read, study, and generate persuasive writing in "non-traditional" forms or with unexpected rhetorical strategies, leaning especially toward image and page/publication design as part of argumentation. The class will also: build and exercise radical visual literacy; require responsible, generative research; posit theory as making; introduce students to a range of topics, and ways thoughtful makers engage with the world; and inspire reevaluation of assumptions about persuasive writing-what it is and what it can be.

This poetry workshop will undertake the constraint of EKPHRASIS: the poem of dialogue between visual art or image and word. We will encounter together current and relevant imagery and also meet at or visit museums in the area to engage with images. We will workshop them in class and complete a small portfolio of work. This course is a writing class that will use various models of poetry as platforms for possible excursions into written projects. We will explore the possibilities by engaging with images and then engaging with the work in a workshop community. With each writing assignment there will be a reading assignment that either exemplifies the "problem" or presents some type of conceptual framework for it.

Despite Los Ángeles being about half "Hispanic or Latino," ArtCenter enrolls only 9% students and employs 11% teachers who are Hispanic/Latino/Latinx. We have in this class an opportunity class where you can study the work of a creative who traces their heritage to this vast hemisphere. We will focus on publishings of the last ten years, consider constraint, form and context. No experience with poetry, history or geography required! This class is NOT lecture-based; come prepared to participate and discuss!

A close examination of the group of texts loosely labeled "graphic novels," in which verbal and visual language come together on the page toward a literary effect. Through study of comics and graphic novels themselves plus a number of critical texts--which examine comics development over time, and how they function both physically and thematically--this course investigates comics' specialized language and the possibilities of narrative in a medium so open, for a number of reasons, to experimentation.

This is an advanced screenwriting workshop that provides students the dedicated time, support from instructor and student and structure needed to move a story from concept to the written script form. Each student is responsible for making consistent progress on a script project they commit to on the first day of class. Preferably, this script project is one that they have begun in HNAR-337 Screenwriting and already is in a solid 3-Act Structure format, with well-developed characters. Additionally, each student is expected to contribute to supporting their fellow classmates' goals through reading and well-considered critique. A collaborative project between enrolled students is also acceptable, as long as the writing is divided equitably among teammates. Pre-req: HNAR-337 Screenwriting, or TDS-319 The Storytelling Project.

This class will begin preparing students for the presentation of their work and of themselves as professional photographers. Students will make a variety of presentations, speaking about their own work, the work of other artists, and on other topics as well. The class will develop research and speaking skills, begin the practice of constructive critique, and explore the variety of venues and new media for presenting work to prospective clients and the public.

Communicating Your Professional Identity. Learn to represent yourself and your ideas clearly and confidently in a professional working environment. This course is ideal for those applying for internships or organizing job searches and interviews following graduation. Students will refine their resume and business correspondence to reflect their individual competitive strengths, as well as enhance communication skills as they relate to presentations, meetings, networking, and interviews. Additional topics include: personal positioning strategy, online presence, professional etiquette, compensation, and mentors. Guest lecturers with expertise in targeted areas of interest will be invited to share their experiences and review portfolios, and as time permits, field trips to local design groups may be scheduled.

This class will examine business and professional practices that help form the basis of a career in photography. The goal is to begin to create a practical business framework for aesthetic and commercial growth in a changing media landscape.

This class offers an insider's view of the business side of film and television development and production, from the acquisition of rights and the negotiation of agreements for writers, producers, directors, and actors, through the many avenues of distribution, including consideration of ancillary markets and so-called new media. Several class meetings will feature guest speakers, including top industry professionals such as studio executives, directors, producers, agents, etc. This class is open to all majors.

The History and Practice of Production Furniture is about learning the sequence of design history. The class focuses on furniture, and includes the wider contextual history of cultural and intellectual influences that have led to important product innovations. Study will include how the arts drive furniture design. The overview will provide a historical foundation for what challenges lie ahead. This knowledge will provide understanding of how successful products created mass market appeal. In the end, the program will provide a comprehensive overview and insights into the rigors and inner-workings of the global furniture market. Each week we will delve into the great furniture designers, their products, and notable players from each decade. Beginning with cave people and the first furniture designs and leading up to the Industrial Revolution, we then move on to eras like the Bauhaus and Modernism, the 50's Eames and Knoll years, and Italian design of the 60-70s. By tracing the path that has taken us to where we are today in furniture design, we can prepare for tomorrow. Each week for homework the students design furniture from the period that we studied in class.

Law and Business for Artists and Designers covers a full range of legal and business issues, including the language used in contracts that affects the license, sale, and creation of designs and other original works of art and design. This course will cover: the basics of copyright law, fair use and copyright defenses, trademark law and registration, maintaining trademark rights and avoiding infringements, and patent law. We learn how to file a copyright application; searching the availability of a trademark and filing a trademark application; how to get a business license, form a corporation, prepare a deal memo, and negotiate a contract; and how to negotiate the resolution of a dispute, a new job position, and a promotion.

This course focuses on the experience of a transportation designer after they begin their career. It will analyze different corporate models and look at how design fits into the overall company's business strategy as it partners with engineering, marketing, product planning and other key areas of the company. Industry executives will regularly participate as subject matter experts to give additional perspective.

Your ability to thrive in an increasing interconnected world is vital to having a successful career. Leadership in a creative context means being able to direct, influence and persuade people of all kinds. Being powerful and effective requires an understanding of when to take charge and when to join forces to work as a team. Collaborative leadership is about working together to achieve goals. This course will explore leadership styles and decision-making; the impact of culture, gender and heritage on leadership; communication and risk taking; motivating and negotiating with people; and team dynamics. You will learn leadership skills via experiential exercises within ever evolving group scenarios throughout the term. Guest speakers and a range of readings on leadership theory will demonstrate a variety of approaches to the concept of modern collaborative leadership.

This course will focus on manufacturing in Los Angeles with both classroom and off campus components. Students will visit manufacturing sites in LA including apparel, shoe, furniture, leathers, accessories and other possible industries. Students will gain insight on how these factories work and see the production process from start to a finished good, as well as consider manufacturing ethics. We will also consider the role of materials in manufacturing and visit local dead stock suppliers. On campus meetings will focus on manufacturing essentials including supply chains and will also include guest speakers.

TestlabBerlin is a sponsored studio abroad project. One core faculty member will run the project for the entire semester, additionally there will be guest faculty/lecturers/guest critics in Berlin. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Students will experiment with new creative strategies for art & design production which will be informed by real-time response from a chosen audience. This feedback process will be enabled both through social media (Socialtecture) and through in-person interaction with the audience. The resulting projects are cross-cultural in nature and dramatically broaden the creative horizon of all participants.

With one of the most vibrant cultures in the world, Berlin is a highly multicultural city with a rich and complex history. In this course, we will examine how notions of German identity have been shaped by that history and investigate its ramifications in contemporary art. The travel portion of the Berlin trip will visit museums, galleries and historical sites, as well as allow students to meet artists and curators and attend events. This class is composed of a pre-trip meetings (approximately 7 three-hour classes) that will include lectures, readings, screenings; and then an immersive 12-day study-away experience in Berlin during the Spring/Summer break.

"This brand sponsored, footwear industry, study-away intensive has two main components: (1) three successive 2-week footwear design assignments targeting Nike, Adidas and UnderArmour and (2) two 1-week business courses at Portland State University Business School with their students. 1. Each 2-week design project will have recent ACCD alumni from these three footwear brands reviewing the students' work each evening leading to final presentations for each brand. 2. The two business courses at PSU are part of PSU's summer Athletic & Outdoor program that will expose our students to footwear business practices and interaction with footwear business students and guest lecturers from the footwear business outside of design. The courses will cover business competitive dynamics and product briefing. The PSU product briefing course I teach will have the students from both programs cooperate on a footwear product brief and resultant product ideation."

"This brand sponsored, footwear industry, study-away intensive has two main components: (1) three successive 2-week footwear design assignments targeting Nike, Adidas and UnderArmour and (2) two 1-week business courses at Portland State University Business School with their students. 1. Each 2-week design project will have recent ACCD alumni from these three footwear brands reviewing the students' work each evening leading to final presentations for each brand. 2. The two business courses at PSU are part of PSU's summer Athletic & Outdoor program that will expose our students to footwear business practices and interaction with footwear business students and guest lecturers from the footwear business outside of design. The courses will cover business competitive dynamics and product briefing. The PSU product briefing course I teach will have the students from both programs cooperate on a footwear product brief and resultant product ideation."

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Set against the backdrop of Berlin, this research-driven studio seeks to peel back layers of history to uncover a glimpse of the future. In response to the theme of Post-Humanism, students will use a transmedia toolkit to create intelligent graphic systems, dynamic experiences and immersive environments.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Set against the backdrop of Berlin, this research-driven studio seeks to peel back layers of history to uncover a glimpse of the future. In response to the theme of Post-Humanism, students will use a transmedia toolkit to create intelligent graphic systems, dynamic experiences and immersive environments.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Set against the backdrop of Berlin, this research-driven studio seeks to peel back layers of history to uncover a glimpse of the future. In response to the theme of Post-Humanism, students will use a transmedia toolkit to create intelligent graphic systems, dynamic experiences and immersive environments.

Reimagine the elements with which we eat, drink, and refresh. How can the design of the objects that surround us elevate our daily routines to a level of ritual, from lighting a candle, to sipping a cup of tea, to savoring the first bite? Informed by traditional and modern rituals, how do you define future rituals for a new generation, and how might new design influence global tastes? Japanese culture is rich with ancient and modern food traditions, from Tea Ceremony and Buddhist Temple food; to bento boxes and communal meals; to contemporary pop-ups and experiments driving the future of food. As we confront a ever-changing world, how might the future of dining play with and against tradition? In this program you will explore the cultural, social and ritual aspects of dining; food on-the-go in a mobile society; nutrition, health and wellness; the process of growing food; and the impact of food waste. You will design new tableware, lighting, and furnishings for dining for a global market. How does each element-from the utensils to the bowl to the table, lighting & surroundings-influence your experience of the meal?

Reimagine the elements with which we eat, drink, and refresh. How can the design of the objects that surround us elevate our daily routines to a level of ritual, from lighting a candle, to sipping a cup of tea, to savoring the first bite? Informed by traditional and modern rituals, how do you define future rituals for a new generation, and how might new design influence global tastes? Japanese culture is rich with ancient and modern food traditions, from Tea Ceremony and Buddhist Temple food; to bento boxes and communal meals; to contemporary pop-ups and experiments driving the future of food. As we confront a ever-changing world, how might the future of dining play with and against tradition? In this program you will explore the cultural, social and ritual aspects of dining; food on-the-go in a mobile society; nutrition, health and wellness; the process of growing food; and the impact of food waste. You will design new tableware, lighting, and furnishings for dining for a global market. How does each element-from the utensils to the bowl to the table, lighting & surroundings-influence your experience of the meal?

Reimagine the elements with which we eat, drink, and refresh. How can the design of the objects that surround us elevate our daily routines to a level of ritual, from lighting a candle, to sipping a cup of tea, to savoring the first bite? Informed by traditional and modern rituals, how do you define future rituals for a new generation, and how might new design influence global tastes? Japanese culture is rich with ancient and modern food traditions, from Tea Ceremony and Buddhist Temple food; to bento boxes and communal meals; to contemporary pop-ups and experiments driving the future of food. As we confront a ever-changing world, how might the future of dining play with and against tradition? In this program you will explore the cultural, social and ritual aspects of dining; food on-the-go in a mobile society; nutrition, health and wellness; the process of growing food; and the impact of food waste. You will design new tableware, lighting, and furnishings for dining for a global market. How does each element-from the utensils to the bowl to the table, lighting & surroundings-influence your experience of the meal?

New York City and Berlin are world-class destinations that have extraordinary appeal to visitors. Both places are rich of outstanding culture, attractions, entertainment, nightlife and events, as well as multicultural neighborhoods to navigate and to explore. In a first-ever official city-to-city tourism collaboration to share best practices, the Spring'20 TestLab project invites ArtCenter students to uncover new insights and create fresh thinking to address tourism challenges and opportunities for New York City and Berlin. 9 units Studio 6 units H+S (Cultural Immersion and German Language) In partnership with the official destination marketing organizations visitBerlin and NYC & Company, ArtCenter students will immerse themselves consecutively in both creative capitals, informing the exploration, thinking and prototyping of creative solutions towards a new kind of responsible tourism.

New York City and Berlin are world-class destinations that have extraordinary appeal to visitors. Both places are rich of outstanding culture, attractions, entertainment, nightlife and events, as well as multicultural neighborhoods to navigate and to explore. In a first-ever official city-to-city tourism collaboration to share best practices, the Spring'20 TestLab project invites ArtCenter students to uncover new insights and create fresh thinking to address tourism challenges and opportunities for New York City and Berlin. 9 units Studio 6 units H+S (Cultural Immersion and German Language) In partnership with the official destination marketing organizations visitBerlin and NYC & Company, ArtCenter students will immerse themselves consecutively in both creative capitals, informing the exploration, thinking and prototyping of creative solutions towards a new kind of responsible tourism.

This class provides a first-hand immersion into the vibrant creative industries of Berlin to explore the "Berlin Way" of living & making in one of the world's most dynamic creative environments. Through the lens of social science, students will gain insights about the interrelationship of Berlin's development as a city with the evolution of its creative industries. Berlin's magnetism to the creative class has dramatically increased over the past twenty years. Ironically, the city's economic stagnation in the early 2000s, which came after a very brief post-reunification gold rush, turned out to be fertile ground on which the German capital's current status as creative global hub could flourish. The combination of cheap inner-city property and strong endorsement of creative freedom helped revive Berlin, which now draws artists and cultural entrepreneurs from around the world. Tech and web entrepreneurs, who are following in increasing numbers artists, designers, writers, and musicians from around the world, have established themselves in Berlin over the past few years and helped create a dynamic economic base for the creative industries and for the city as a whole. Berlin's urban density mixes living and workspaces, facilitated by a shared, highly integrated transport system. Informal encounters between greatly diverse populations are a daily reality, making the city a place of inclusion and constant creative inspiration. Built on rich sediments of cultural heritage, Berlin's pavement is literally vibrating with creative energy from the underground. Cultural trends born in various subcultures quickly find their way into the mainstream, allowing for rapid innovation in design, technology, and cultural expression. In addition to guest lectures and discussions with Berlin-based experts (architectural historians, urban developers, city marketeers, etc.) students will meet and interview protagonists of Berlin's creative scene, visit their studios, and will also learn to search and discover the next up-and-coming talents of Berlin. Collectively, all participants of this course will contribute through writing, audio-visual edits and visual interpretations to a webbased knowledge base that maps the ever-evolving creative industries of Berlin. The Berlin Way project could evolve into an ongoing signature project of the ArtCenter Berlin studio, a resource to current and future Testlab Berlin participants - and potentially to the creative industries of Berlin.

This course will provide you with a solid understanding of customer behaviors, and how to influence those behaviors by examining a wide range of customer insights and market driving strategies.

An intensive bootcamp that will have designers and MBA students working together to create viable concepts for improving INSEADs sustainable footprint. This course is based on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Designers will have the opportunity to gain insights into the challenges of implementing meaningful change in a challenging landscape. They will work on projects that are chosen by the teams and will work with a process developed by the instructor.

This course will look at the development and promise of new business models in support of the triple bottom line (People, Planet and Profit) It will provide you with an overview of the opportunities for designer to work closely with other disciplines to create and support business models that will be more sustainable.

This course is an intensive exploration of the athletic industry business model and the ongoing digital influences challenging the paradigm. Student teams will analyze how products are developed, transported, marketed and sold by creating branded, team-generated individual projects and digitally driven business models.

This course in human athletic biomechanics is taught by the team at BioMechanica LLC (biomechanica.com). Led by principals Martyn Shorten Ph.D. and Simon Luthi Ph.D., student teams will learn about the human mechanical attributes of sport and apply them to projects that reimagine footwear and digital documentation through team-generated individual projects.

Hands-on and theoretical material understanding and creation. We will cover the history, properties and strategies of materials applied to products. Students will cover topics on mechanical properties, optical properties, thermal/electrical properties and material selection strategies.

How business affects and is affected by CMF. We will discuss Industrial Design as it relates to businesses and their customers, negotiation with vendors, Intellectual property. How to engage with Makers, customers. Managing info flow, alignment with internal management and outside vendors. Students will receive instruction on Copyright, Trademark and Patent as well as publicity and privacy rights, non-disclosure agreements and obligations and overview of contracts and deal memos/term sheets.

Students are challenged to look at the next incarnation of the Co-Working trend, examining possible hybrids that engage all of our senses and offer opportunities to redefine the future of work. They will look at the psychological and social aspects of Berliners more entrepreneurial attitude ti different kinds of work - and how to construct meaningful physical environments around them to deliver the most effective impact.

Students are challenged to look at the next incarnation of the Co-Working trend, examining possible hybrids that engage all of our senses and offer opportunities to redefine the future of work. They will look at the psychological and social aspects of Berliners more entrepreneurial attitude ti different kinds of work - and how to construct meaningful physical environments around them to deliver the most effective impact.

ArtCenter Berlin is a trans-disciplinary topic-based project that provides ACCD students a unique cultural, political, and historical lens into Europe, Germany, and Berlin, in particular. Context is critical, the zeitgeist of the Berlin location provides important grounding for investigation and exploring new ways of thinking. The project tests ArtCenter student's conceptual abilities in unfamiliar surroundings while applying their technical tool kit to create relevant, real-world solutions.

Berlin provides a deeper understanding of German culture, the history of the country and the mentality of its people. Being based in the capital of Germany, a strong emphasis is put on the unique situation and position of Berlin in the past, present and in the future. In order to take full advantage of the fact the we are "vor Ort", lectures are accompanied by extensive field trips. These include museums, exhibitions and architectural landmarks but - as important - students will experience the rhythm of the city and various urban lifestyles of neighborhoods. Traveling, being outside the studio is an essential part of the course. Open your eyes, your mind, notice the small details, be aware, discover and discuss. Students will always have a camera, pen and paper to sketch and take notes. Rather than memorizing dates, numbers and historical facts, this course is as holistic and visual as possible. Movies, museums, architecture - a sense of 'place' will help students learn about Berlin and Germany but - even more important - to fully immerse and experience your new town.

This course, is an exploration of the use of new and emergent technologies in the generation and execution of a creative design process. Students will be introduced to a range of digital tools with both physical and virtual implications, and use these tools to innovate, iterate and develop solutions to discrete problems. Students will explore of a wide range of current technologies and media, as well as the value and nature of human interaction with technology as part of the design process. Subjects will include: prototyping, code as Medium, emerging tech, and interaction. The course will be structured by a series of one-to-two-week long assignments culminating in a longer final project. Course Learning Outcomes: 1. Prototyping: Students will be able to construct working prototypes of experiences across a continuum of technologies and media. 2. Code as Medium: Students will learn how the use of code can be an integral part of the creative process - that code can generate design, not just execute it. 3. Emerging tech: Students will learn about a range of emerging design and production technologies and explore how to apply these to creative project work. 4. Interaction: Students will be able to identify and communicate how, where, when, and why people connect to interactive experiences. 5. Interaction: Students will be able to design with intent: prototype, test and refine an interaction incorporating feedback from users.

This course is an exploration of the use of new and emergent technologies in the generation and execution of a creative design process. Students will be introduced to a range of digital tools with both physical and virtual implications, and use these tools to innovate, iterate and develop solutions to discrete problems. This course (following Creative Technologies 360) builds on a basic technology base in order to further develop selected technologies in application to specific design objectives. Course will include physical computing, physical/digital making, and design experiences including VR, AR and MR. Students will test and validate concepts using prototypes of proposed solutions.The course will be structured by two to three in-depth assignments that investigate both technology and process, culminating in a final project. Course Learning Outcomes: 1. Learn to learn: Students will explore a range of creative and design methodologies and learn how to apply them to projects in a relevant manner. 2. Physical Computing: Students will be able to develop and demonstrate familiarity with digital electronics through experimentation with interactive prototyping platforms. 3. Physical Computing: Develop and demonstrate familiarity with coding through digital prototyping exercises. 4. Physical/Digital Making: Students will be able to design for the spatial sense, considering how humans perceive, move through and remember the virtual and physical world around them. 5. Physical/Digital Making: Design experiences (for example: VR, AR or MR etc), interactions,products, projects using emerging tools, technologies and processes.

This introduction to psychology focuses on the structure and experience of the self. We may picture ourselves in contrast to others, such as when we experience ourselves as less extrovert than our friend. Or we find ourselves overweight relative to that model. This is how we imagine ourselves. We have many self images: a body image, an image of our personality, a professional self image, and so on. We spend much time worrying about how to imagine ourselves, and whether our self images are 'normal'. In this class will survey the psychological research on the self and the problems of the self. The course will cover topics such as memory and emotion, identity, overthinking, imposter syndrome and body image. A central topic in all of this is the notion that we imagine ourselves, for better or for worse. We will explore this through lectures and discussion, as well as weekly creative exercises where you will be asked to imagine alternative selves. This class will help you to express yourself and to reach your audience in a more nuanced way.

This course covers the principles of engineering that guide the development of automobile design and manufacture, including automobile functionality and an overview of the demands placed on the design process.

This course will familiarize students with general human factors principles that are at the heart of any effective design. Students will be introduced to areas of human performance, cognition, ergonomics, memory, and behavior. Reading assignments plus in-class and take-home projects will expose students to a variety of human factors theories and design examples. Two group projects are required: these allow students to apply the principles they have learned.

This course introduces students to numerous aspects of illumination, from the practical to the conceptual, from the creative to the technological. We will survey the history, technology, and design of lighting through both research and hands-on experimentation. Field trips, lectures, readings, and guest presentations will cover topics including: optics, basic circuits, and electrical wiring; technologies such as LEDs, fiber-optics, CCFLs, EL and neon; lighting in space, and of sculpture and products; history and theory of color; artificial illumination and day lighting; the affect of light on neurology and psychology; retail, commercial, and residential lighting strategies.

This course offers a survey of the role of structure as a foundation of successful design. As a practical concept, structure embraces many design parameters: form, function, cost, durability, and manufacturability. From a theoretical standpoint, however, understanding and predicting how these parameters interact requires knowledge of details from the disparate fields of physics, engineering, materials science, and history, among others. This course will explore these complex relationships by introducing definitions, methods, and analytical techniques complimented by a more historical perspective on the function of structure. Case studies in the lessons of structural failure will illustrate how cutting-edge design must, at times, balance on a knife's edge, and how such daring might be safely and dependably accomplished in the future.

This course introduces students to the many universal plastic materials and fabrication processes currently used in design and product development. Students will learn how to recognize and evaluate materials and processes that influence product development, and how to do basic cost estimating relating to different processes and aspects of model making.

Science is often portrayed as an engine of unnatural desires and disasters. In reality, science is our best approach for answering fundamental questions about our world, questions of "why" and "how", explorations of unseen processes. Re-expressed as technology, science has enabled the magic of our modern world. So what exactly is science, and how can you use it in your own life and work? This class teaches hands-on techniques of scientific inquiry and how to apply them to investigating questions relating to your own professional practice.

How do we authenticate an animation cel, tell ancient artifacts from modern artifice, and unmask art forgers? This course explores recent trends in the world of art crime and the growing use of materials science and forensic analysis to authenticate, preserve, and repatriate cultural heritage. The age and makeup of creative works can be determined using carbon dating, multispectral imaging, and other scientific tools. In this hands-on course, participants will gain an understanding of artists' materials, apply scientific techniques to see otherwise invisible clues to origin and alteration, and get an insider's look at the hidden histories of artifacts and the meaning of authenticity.

Introduction to Materials Science & Engineering This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of materials science. In addition to learning about the four major classes of materials (metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites), students will get an overview of the major topics accompanying materials, including bonding, crystal systems, materials defects and failure, thermodynamics, diffusion, and phase diagrams. Finally, students will be introduced to the major functional properties of materials, including mechanical, thermal, optical, electrical, magnetic, and acoustic properties. Students will also learn the standard methods of testing for each type of property. Proficiency in algebra and geometry are required. Basic chemistry, trigonometry and calculus are helpful but not required.

This course studies human biology within the framework of evolution with an emphasis on primates, primate behavior origins, leading to the 65 million years of ancestral human physiology as evidenced by the fossil record.

This course introduces students to the fundamental components and systems of the automobile, including such areas as engine and powertrain, wheels, color and trim, fuels and emissions, lighting, engineering and manufacturing fundamentals. Course lectures are augmented with fieldtrips to local manufacturing facilities. This course will also introduce students to the various means of fabricating automotive components, covering such processes as thermoforming, fiberglass and machining.

This course is about the architecture of diverse forms of vehicles, with emphasis on automobiles. Topics include dimensions, human packaging, general layout of components, structure and proportions. H-Point is used as the text for the course.

The leading edge of design is becoming increasingly high tech. Microprocessors are enabling designers to incorporate both sophisticated behaviors and intelligent user interfaces into their products. This class will introduce students to a modern, low-cost microprocessor, the Arduino, and teach the core electronic sciences required to use it to control interactive design. This class assumes no prior knowledge of electronics, although students should have basic mathematical skills.

This prototyping-oriented class leads students through numerous open-ended, small-to-mid-scale design briefs in the Raspberry Pi 3 development environment. Students will explore environmentally deployed embedded media, mapping and surveillance techniques, as well as basic interaction strategies as a means to establish computer literacy in an always-connected, internet-of-things context. Simultaneously, students will learn strategies for seeing a project through from ideation to completion. Regular critiques will provide an opportunity for students to share their research and prototypes with their colleagues as well as receive direct feedback from the instructor.

The future isn't just something that happens but something that can and should be shaped by people with vision; choosing the correct path cannot be left entirely to the scientists and technologists, nor to politicians and entrepreneurs. This class will focus on understanding the basic science behind the upcoming revolutions in bio-technology, artificial intelligence, and quantum science, and on engaging students in developing a shared vision of a desirable future. Topics will include: robotics and artificial intelligence; quantum, nano, and bio-technology; future energy sources; and mankind's possible future in space. The range of problems that our society will face in coming years will be discussed, with particular emphasis on the science behind issues such as global warming. Ethical dilemmas posed by technology will also be explored.

Why is the sky blue? Why is blood red? Why is the sun yellow? Why does a blood-red sun, setting in a deep blue sky, occasionally turn green? This course begins with a history of light, from mystical representations of light and vision in ancient Greece to the strange quantum duality of particles and waves. From there we will shift to a more classical approach: to scattering, and why sunsets are red and the sky is blue. From the properties of light waves, we will move on to refraction and lenses. There will be one major class project: designing and using an advanced pinhole camera, which utilize many optics concepts and offer unparalleled opportunities for experimentation and artistic exploration.

The information in this class is as vital to a practicing artist as knowledge of surgical instruments and pharmaceuticals are to a surgeon. We will explore the physical and chemical properties of artists' materials, both common and uncommon, and how to select the right tools for the job. We will cover fine art, graphic art, and illustration materials: drawing materials, painting materials and mediums, pigments, electronic print media, papers and boards, canvases and supports, brushes, framing and storage, how to avoid creating art that self-destructs, and most importantly, how to protect yourself from exposure to hazardous materials.

Space travel has become an essential technology area for humanity and is inextricably linked to our shared future. Human technology now extends across the whole of the Solar System and beyond. We are now, more than ever, a spacefaring species - teaching, learning, and sharing our joined efforts and interests in this arena has never been more vital. The essential dialogue of space travel spans a vast encyclopedia of terms and topics, not limited to: technological, demographic, sociological, emotional, financial, historical, political. The scope of our understanding, therefore, must encompass a true interplanetary perspective, including a grasp of how we come to terms with our own personal roles in the human expansion into space. This course provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the current state of humanity's technological steps into space, broadly presented from a conceptual and experiential point of view. It is intended for students who anticipate a role in the rapidly expanding industry of space exploration as well as for those who seek a basic understanding of the history, technology, and future of space travel. The course material will cover elements of history, science, mathematics, engineering, art, and literature, and invite discussion of current developments and controversies that face our future in space.

This course explores the impact of overpopulation, urbanization, pollution, politics, and environmental activism on the land, oceans, and atmosphere. Such topics as endangered species, biodiversity, overpopulation, animal rights, deforestation, desertification, toxic waste, global warming, ozone depletion, wetlands destruction, oceanic threats, and overgrazing will be covered. Students will be better informed to interpret complex environmental issues and apply them to their work and daily lives. They will be better prepared to have their work, either design or fine art, reflect the urgent nature of global concerns. They will also be introduced to the idea of science as the foundation of the realities facing our world today.

This class is designed to be an interesting introduction to ocean science, developing in students a deeper understanding of our planet's largest feature, its origin and its uniqueness, plus investigating the ocean as a significant influence on our everyday lives. Students will learn about the sensitive interconnectedness between delicate biological balances and physical driving forces, as well as the life-style choices we make that profoundly impact the ocean. This course is for the student who is curious about the ocean, yet who may have little or no formal background in science.

Sound. Sight. Touch. Smell. Taste. These are the means we use to perceive and understand our world. How can we push the limits of our senses to gain knowledge and advance ourselves as human beings? What other modes of perception are out there? As humans, the amount of information we can take in with our physiological sensors (our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) is relatively limited. For example, dogs can travel through time with their nose, using smell to pick up past information and predict disease long before we can. Bats can use sound as sight by echolocation. Dragonflies can see perfectly in low light and over 5 times as fast. Advances in science and technology have allowed us to move well beyond our bodily limitations to gain a greater understanding of the material world from the atomic scale to the universal scale. How do these sense mechanisms work? What perceptual devices have we come up with to push each of these senses to their limits? How does this knowledge transform human progress? Can we gain a higher state of consciousness? What happens when our senses get mixed up? How do we make up for an absence of sense? This class will use lectures, discussion, and hands-on experimental work to develop a holistic scientific understanding of how the senses work and advanced sensing technology (i.e. microscopes, transducers, etc) with no need for prior high-level scientific knowledge or mathematics.

This project-oriented class leads students through several open-ended, small-to-mid-scale projects. Students will explore interaction, environmental/ambient sensing strategies, and more complex digital electronics systems as a means to increase their understanding of contemporary approaches to electronics and computation. Regular critiques will provide an opportunity for students to share their individual research with their colleagues as well as receive direct feedback from the instructor.

This class will use lectures, discussion, and hands-on experimental work to develop a holistic understanding of nanotechnology with no need for prior high-level scientific knowledge or mathematics. With tentative guest lectures from experts, as well as a field trip, students will have weekly readings and writing assignments where they will be expected to synthesize what they learned by relating it to their own life and art/design practice. The final project entails looking into the future to develop a nanoscience project proposal.

Computers and devices have become ubiquitous in our lives. This course aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems and to help students, regardless of their major, feel justifiably confident of their ability to write useful programs and be creative. Students will learn how software works, how to think about problems logically and how to translate solutions into algorithms and code. Students will put these techniques to work creating their own game inspired by the classic 80's arcade. The class uses the Python language but NO previous coding experience is required.

This is a multi-disciplinary class about dreams, focusing on the science of sleep and dreaming, the structure of dreaming, and the way "dream logic" informs the work of writers, artists, and filmmakers. Students will learn about the physiology of sleep and sleep disorders, and about the neurology and phenomenology of dream content. We will discuss earlier ways of analyzing content (Freud), as well the contemporary scientific understanding of the narrative structure of dreams. We'll also see how artistic works can be accessed through the same methods that can be used in making meaning in dreams. Dreams create a sense or experience of meaning: how artists translate these dream experiences into artistic expressions will be a continuing theme throughout the course.

Over the next hundred years, mankind will find itself in a life or death race: can we develop the technology needed to achieve a sustainable society before we deplete the earth's resources or irrevocably damage the environment? This course will explore the science of sustainability, including topics such as climate change, alternative energy, relationships between poverty and sustainability, and the future of the car.

"Design" is being redefined, and designers must now use their unlimited ingenuity to consider the environmental consequences of materials, production methods, performance, and life cycling. Students learn the fundamental principles of the science of ecology, study methods for evaluating environmental performance of design/product concepts, and learn current strategies for creating a sustainable interface between design and the environment.

Environmental designers have increasingly been called upon to work with sustainable building practices by the client, the investor, and the commissioner. As a result, choices in material availability, energy type, water usage, water drainage, and fabrication methods have evolved, and new trends in environmental products and spatial designs have developed. This course will provide a historical overview of sustainable design practices as they relate to vernacular architecture and spatial environments ranging from micro-scaled building forms and interiors to macro-scaled landscapes and exterior building skins. Students will research and analyze the sustainability factor for a number of case studies while building a vocabulary and understanding of trends in sustainable building practices. Students will furthermore evaluate sustainable building practices through a variety of tools, including the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for products and the USGBC LEED accreditation system for buildings and neighborhoods.

Why do similar patterns and forms appear in nature in instances that seem to bear no relationship to one another? The windblown ripples of desert sand have a sinuous pattern that resembles the stripes of a zebra or a marine fish. The three dimensional trellis-like skeletons of microscopic sea creatures contain the same angles and intersections as those in a wall of foam or bubbles. The stepped leaders of a lightning bolt mirror the branches of a tree, or the drainage basin of rivers. These are not mere coincidences. Are the sizes (and sometimes even the shapes) of 'creatures great and small' actually determined by the laws of physics and chemistry? Nature commonly weaves its tapestry by employing 'self-organization,' rather than relying upon some master plan or blueprint. Physical forces, such as gravity and surface tension, shape the form of all living things in ways both subtle and profound. Simple, local interactions between its component parts - be they grains of sand, living cells, or even diffusing molecules - are all that are necessary to produce a myriad of forms. The products of self-organization are typically universal patterns: spirals, spots, and stripes, branches or honeycombs.

This is a foundational course in quantum physics and astrophysics for artists. We will explore the intersections of astrophysics and dark energy with the mind and science fiction. We will study the strange astrophysical creatures that inhabit the universe. Topics such as black holes, time dilation, wormholes, and cosmological infinity will be used as portals to launch us into other worlds. We will ask an unusual question: if there is a speed of light, is there also a speed of dark? Throughout the class there will be exercises where you will use the methods of asking questions as the basis to design your own parallel universes and their enchanting inhabitants. The course textbook is Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

How Things Work develops introductory skills to become entertainment design thinkers and professional concept artists. Hands-on exploration of principles from engineering and physics are used to improve storytelling by creating depth and immersion in the worlds and concepts the students create, while overcoming traditional fears associated with hard sciences.

Alice in Wonderland counts six impossible things before breakfast; can you count six "impossible materials"? To do that, we first need to cover a few basics. This course aims to provide students with the necessary foundation and primary tools for their art and design practices in relation to materials science and engineering. Starting from the fundamentals of scientific practice and its relation to art and design, we will learn about the building blocks of animate and inanimate worlds, how materials are produced, classified, characterized and used; constantly relating those to their impact on society's past, present and future. After covering key concepts such as materials ecology, sustainability, bio-mimicking and nanotechnology as well as case studies such as smart screens, comet dust catchers, self-repairing clothes, computer chips made of DNA, or heavy-duty stickers inspired by gecko feet, we will ideate on how to make the impossible -such as flexible glass, transparent metals, or plastics stronger than concrete- possible through novel material design approaches. We will end with reflections on the future of materials science and technology. Apart from regular lectures, we will implement use of online tools, laboratory practices, and/or field trips where the pandemic allows. The assessment will be done via content-based home-work assignments and a final project idea presentation. High school-level proficiency on arithmetic operations is required. Basic knowledge in chemistry or physics is helpful but not necessary.?

Within astronomical margins and current prospects, we are at a point in history roughly between the first human on the Moon and that on Mars. Meanwhile, the United Nations' 2030 agenda targets 17 interlinked global goals to be achieved "for a better and more sustainable future for all". How do these two missions interact? What are the environmental costs and rewards of a multi-planetary future to Earth? Can we really sustain life on another planet? We will tackle these questions within a materials science context in a broad spectrum of topics ranging from transportation to architecture, from clothes to everyday objects, from energy sources to space debris, etc. We will ideate on those in relation to art and design, review relevant works of thinkers and makers of the world, remembering to look back at Earth whilst moving ahead.

Seeing, visualizing, and dreaming are closely related: they are all perceptual experiences. In this course we will explore what is known about visual imagination (visualizing), as the neurological mechanisms of visual imagination offer a foundation for comparing it to other visual experiences. As often in neurology, we can learn from brain scan and brain lesion studies, allowing for examination of both normal visualizing and its disorders. Psychological studies investigate the role of visualizing and like other forms of imagination in cognition; as visualizing is a private experience, we will look at phenomenological analyses and compare them with our own first-person knowledge. Finally, we will explore what happens when we externalize visualizing in the forms of sketching, drawing, or painting.

This course examines how the human mind is like artificial intelligence and how it is unique. Human sensory processing, which we use to orient ourselves in the world, serves as the basis for our actions and our imaginings, and is quite different from AI. The way we extend our senses and therefore our mind into the outside world, while managing inside perceptions, creates our unique sense of embodiment. Embodiment is a hotly debated subject in the context of machine learning. We take a closer look at the emergence of memory and imaginative-predictive skills in the brain as we look towards optimizing creativity and flow states. Further, we examine the impact of imagination on human technological inventions especially in the field of computational systems and large language models. We will consider how the human mind and artificial intelligence may shape the future of science, design, and art.

Should the design of spaces modify our social behavior? Can lighting and ceiling height really impact our mood? We entertain these and other questions in Intersections - a course that introduces you to the concept and practice of using cognitive science to cultivate a spatial design mindset. The overarching goal of the course is to introduce students to the design possibilities and benefits of acting on a unified theory of architectural / spatial design that recognizes the value of added cognitive science research. Throughout the term, we take a cross-sector perspective and focus on the spatial research and theories developed by contemporary architects and neuroscientists. We will fine tune our questions by looking at remarkable, spatial projects made possible through partnerships of architects, spatial designers and cognitive neuroscientists. These projects show us how a collaboration between designer and scientist can disrupt current spatial psychology and invigorate user research for spatial design and spatial justice. Students will have a chance to conduct and present independent and collaborative user research into a topic of spatial psychology and spatial justice that is informed by cognitive science. By the end of the term, members of the course will have solved a mystery and be able to show evidence of how spatial design impacts how we live, work, play and heal.

This course provides a global overview of the interdisciplinary fields of art conservation and world heritage preservation. The investigation, treatment, and management of art collections, archaeology, archives, and architecture face diverse challenges ranging from climate change and globalization to air pollution, overtourism, art crime and repatriation claims. The subject also raises fundamental questions of cultural sustainability: What physical legacy of our culture do we want to pass on to the future? How can we prolong the lifespan of a cherished object? How do we provide access to cultural heritage and its ongoing conservation, interpretation, research, and management? What tangible or intangible elements of culture should we work to sustain and why?

Increasingly, designers use research as a critical component of the design process to establish a strong problem foundation, to discover fresh, uncharted opportunities, and to test their design hypotheses. This course provides you with a toolbox of techniques and methods for design-centric research as an integral component of the design process that can be used throughout your career. Beginning with a short survey of how research has been used historically, the course quickly moves to hands-on projects that explore a variety of research methods and processes: from media surveys to interview techniques and the ethical considerations required with their use. The research methods explored in this class expose students to both non-discipline-specific and discipline-specific techniques, balancing the research process between form-making, community insight, and critical reflection.

This course will introduce students to the practice of Design Research with a focus on the history, methodologies, methods, and tools utilized in professional practice. We will examine how research can provide a compelling logic for design, and employ a range of research activities including ethnographic interviews, observations, and generative approaches. Students will learn how to plan and conduct an original design research project, analyze the information gathered, and articulate opportunities for creative projects. The ethical considerations of social research practice will be emphasized and examined through texts and student experiences. Working in small groups, students will participate in reflective, inquiry-based critique models contributing to a collaborative, iterative educational environment. Students will communicate what they learn through weekly presentations, reflective writing, and a final presentation. The final creative brief will communicate the research process, key insights and opportunities, recommendations for design, and speculative visualizations or prototypes.

As fine artists, we know that concepts, materials, and processes combine to make a work, but how can we nurture our innate curiosity to feed our work more deeply? Get brave with research! In this class we empower your creative process to reach heightened levels of curiosity leading to a richer artistic vision. We will map research strategies to find undiscovered inspiration within areas you are already passionate about. You will chart discoveries and deal with inevitable failures as you expand your process of inquiry to make new work. Faculty will bring unique insights from social science research and visual art practice to help you embrace brave choices in unknown territory. We will study artists' research processes in a variety of areas and mediums and use scientific inquiry, literature, social science methodologies, photography, prototyping, and material applications to explore new avenues in your practice. This class is a 3-hour project-based seminar with weekly assignments including writing, artwork, audio-visual presentations, and field trips.

How do you want to live and move in the world? What values do you hold dear? Such things are influenced by culture. This course provides an overview of sociocultural anthropology-the study of culture and how humans make sense and meaning of their lives. Critically examine such topics as food, sexuality, and death from an anthropological point of view. Explore the ethics of research design and the politics of representation as they might relate to your art. Gain hands-on experience with ethnographic research methods such as interviews and observations. Conduct your own mini-ethnography project with the guidance of your professor. By recognizing the ways in which humans shape the world, learning how our beliefs and practices emerge, and reflecting on ourselves, we can begin to more consciously and intentionally shape our lives, identities, and the worlds in and around us.

This introduction to psychology focuses on the structure and experience of the self. We may picture ourselves in contrast to others, such as when we experience ourselves as less extrovert than our friend. Or we find ourselves overweight relative to that model. This is how we imagine ourselves. We have many self images: a body image, an image of our personality, a professional self image, and so on. We spend much time worrying about how to imagine ourselves, and whether our self images are 'normal'. In this class will survey the psychological research on the self and the problems of the self. The course will cover topics such as memory and emotion, identity, overthinking, imposter syndrome and body image. A central topic in all of this is the notion that we imagine ourselves, for better or for worse. We will explore this through lectures and discussion, as well as weekly creative exercises where you will be asked to imagine alternative selves. This class will help you to express yourself and to reach your audience in a more nuanced way.

In conjunction with the Pacific Rim 8 Studio "Influencing Dining: California Lifestyle," this class will explore different cultural histories and relationships between art, design, and food in the social, political, and diverse cultural contexts of Los Angeles and the US. It will feature artists working with food ecologies, including: Leslie Labowitz and her Sproutime project, from 70s performance to a major organic food business; the social practice of L.A. collective Fallen Fruit; and the philosophy and aesthetics of Gordon Matta-Clark's FOOD restaurant in 1970s NYC. We will take two field trips: one to the Sunday morning service at the African-American AME Church, including a soul food meal; another to Latino East Los Angeles in conjunction with our examination of the politics and history of latinos and food production. We will also look at the Persian diaspora in LA and its culinary culture, show films and videos, and hold a special Thanksgiving Feast and discuss its evolution. Art Center's Pacific Rim students are encouraged to participate along with TAMA students.

This course will find students (alongside their instructor) grappling with human desire and creativity in the individual quest for friendship, sex, power, and love. Through reading, writing, discussion, and artmaking, we'll tackle important, if potentially uncomfortable issues surrounding childhood sexuality, intersexuality, perversion, pornography, prostitution, casual sex, acquaintance rape, dating, and marriage-and the ethical concerns to which these issues inevitably give rise. As an undergraduate philosophy seminar, we'll generally raise difficult questions rather than accept stock answers. Throughout, we'll try to maintain our composure even when a little vulnerability is called for and the facts are in dispute. The only prerequisites are an open mind and an interest in self-exploration.

This course will familiarize students with general human factors principles that are at the heart of any effective design. Students will be introduced to areas of human performance, cognition, ergonomics, memory, and behavior. Reading assignments plus in-class and take-home projects will expose students to a variety of human factors theories and design examples. Two group projects are required: these allow students to apply the principles they have learned.

As design assumes an increasingly strategic role in both for-profit and non-profit domains, designers must expand their ability to think contextually about people, organizations, markets, brands, and publics they're designing for. This course teaches students how to become insightful about the world by honing their research and analysis skills to translate information into strategic opportunities for design. Insights introduces various approaches to trend research in the socio-cultural, technological, and design spheres and explores how designers can utilize trends to inform their creative work. Insights was originally built around industry practice informed by corporations like Nokia, Nike, Target, and Apple that have dedicated "Design Insights" teams. It continues to be informed by the methods and practices of researchers who specialize in providing credible, strategic insights to their clients.

This course is designed to provide students with both the historical context and foundational research skills they need to create art, design, and media for both local and global social innovation. During the first half of the term we will analyze social documentary photography, human-centered design, museum exhibitions, films, urban planning, and architecture to help students establish a framework for understanding creative interventions into international development and social advocacy. Building on this context, each student will conduct an independent research project that investigates a topic or opportunity within the field of social impact. Students will create images, objects, and writing as part of an integrated research practice, and revise these materials in ways appropriate to the practices of art and design; they will also practice design research and introductory ethnographic field methods in order to gain fresh insight on their chosen topics. Students will be challenged to think critically about the cultural, political, and economic effects of art and design interventions. Final projects will consist of a presentation and a short paper detailing each student's research experiences and reflections.

Design for Social Innovation. Design for Social Impact. Public Interest Design. Social Design. Design for Good. Design for Social Good. All of these terms have been used (sometimes interchangeably) to refer to design that makes society better. But how does Design for Social Innovation (or whatever we call it!) actually happen? What are some roles designers might inhabit when enacting social change? Who might designers need to work with, and how might they work differently when designing with a socially-conscious intent? In Design for Social Innovation, we will trace the histories, theories, and practices necessary for a foundational knowledge of the space. Resources will be drawn from historians, cultural theorists, public figures, and, of course, designers themselves. Real-world case studies of social innovation design projects from around the globe and right here at ArtCenter will be centered in our weekly analysis, yielding important insights regarding successes and failures. Students will leave this class with an understanding of what questions to ask, what methods to pull from, and who to seek out when working on projects intended to lead us to a sustainable, equitable and ethical future.

The purpose of this class is to gain a more thoughtful and critical understanding of a brand, its history, current trends, social and ethical implications, and cultural context, as well as the brand's relationship to our individual and generational identity. We will explore sustainability and its impact on brand value, and what it means to create truly responsible design. Students will conduct and evaluate various forms of research and develop brand platforms and creative briefs to inform and inspire innovative solutions within their current design projects. Through class discussions of design thinking, critiques of design work, guest speakers, presentation and analysis of case studies, and development of branding strategies and strategy diagrams, we will examine how a brand is defined and translated through environmental design, product, graphics, advertising, and communications. We will work in multidisciplinary teams in a design charette format to created branded projects to directly implement what we have learned over the term.

The primary focus of this class will be to explore brands and how they shape our ideas, identity and society. Students will gain a better understanding of their brand and the audience they are designing for in their SXD2 studio. Each student will create a brand video that expresses the positioning and purpose of their brand and its desired influence on the target audience. We will seek brand insights that are informative, inspiring, and memorable that will drive the design of studio projects. Translation of the brand through various touchpoints, including what this means for the brand to live its values while engaging audiences in meaningful ways, will be examined. Students will work on presentation skills to better clarify and communicate their SXD2 studio project story and message.

The objective of this class is to gain a more thoughtful and critical understanding of a brand, its current trends, social and ethical implications, cultural context, as well as the brand's relationship to our individual and generational identity. We will explore what it means to create purpose-driven brands, grounded in values, culture, and authenticity that connect and create meaning. Students will uncover key insights from various forms of research and analysis to develop brand platforms that will inform and inspire innovative design solutions. Through class discussions, studio visits, field trips and case studies, we will examine how a brand is defined and translated through its various touchpoints. We will work in interdisciplinary teams to develop creative briefs and branding strategies to re-position a brand and communicate compelling and relevant stories using the tools that we have learned over the term.

This course studies human biology within the framework of evolution with an emphasis on primates, primate behavior origins, leading to the 65 million years of ancestral human physiology as evidenced by the fossil record.

Explore the science of sleep and dreaming, the structure of a dream, and the way "dream logic" informs the work of writers, artists, and filmmakers. In this multidisciplinary course you will learn about the physiology of sleep and sleep disorders and the neurology and phenomenology of dream content. We will also discuss earlier ways of analyzing content (Freud), as well the contemporary scientific understanding of the narrative structure of dreams. Dreams create a sense of experience of meaning: how artists translate these experiences into artistic expressions will be a continuing theme throughout the course. We will also discuss how artistic works can be accessed through the same methods used in making meaning in dreams.

"Design" is being redefined, and designers must now use their unlimited ingenuity to consider the environmental consequences of materials, production methods, performance, and life cycling. Students learn the fundamental principles of the science of ecology, study methods for evaluating environmental performance of design/product concepts, and learn current strategies for creating a sustainable interface between design and the environment.

Crowds are typical of modern urban experience: audiences and spectators, commuters and shoppers, protesters and believers all participate in the logic of the crowd. But what does it mean to join the masses, to be counted amongst the population, or to disappear into the multitude? At the turn of the twentieth century we understood the crowd as a dangerous figure to be feared and suppressed, but now we seem to have new categories of both 'crowd intelligence' and 'smart cities'. How should we understand the aesthetics and politics of the crowd today? This seminar course will look at the history and theory of crowds, cross-examining the group psychology of the modern masses with the urban biopolitics of population, circulation, and complexity. Through a range of historical and theoretical readings, the course will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the crowd and its impact on our understanding of mass media, mass culture, and modern life.

Stemming from the ubiquity of "Made in China" in our daily lives, this course focuses on the history of Chinese ceramics from various perspectives, with particular emphasis on global frameworks. The history of ceramics in China spans 14,000 years and geographic sites of production too numerous to count. Ceramics are among the earliest human artifacts known from China. They have been a constant part of everyday life, ritual practice, imperial ceremony and global trade yet largely divorced from mainstream art historical scholarship. Aside from a few sessions devoted to standard chronological accounts of ceramics, this course is topical and organized around themes. This course's first aim is to give students a basic understanding of the technical and social aspects of Chinese ceramic production: forms and decoration of Chinese ceramics, the porcelain center of Jingdezhen in particular, and the political and cultural aspects of porcelain's consumption. The second aim is to explore how histories of ceramics have been written and consider the broader social processes that have influenced the study of Chinese ceramics. A central concern will be to reconstruct as a class the history of the study of ceramics as a vital part of understanding the "China" of chinaware more broadly.

"Just squat down awhile and after that things begin to happen." - Zora Neale Hurston Ethnographic methods are central to the work of anthropology, and this qualitative approach has been increasingly adopted by designers seeking to understand their users and the cultural contexts in which they intervene. This course offers an introduction to ethnography as it has been practiced and transformed in anthropology and beyond, along with practical tools for generating ethnographic insights for use in the design process. Premised on hands-on engagement across cultural contexts, ethnography traces the varied shape of cultural life, aspiring to grounded, respectful, and dialogic accounts of the everyday. Such insights offer a vital resource for designers interested in developing innovative and ethical solutions to collective challenges. During this course, students will learn a variety of ethnographic methods while employing them at a chosen fieldsite. The resulting data will inform the development of a final project. Course readings and discussions will offer an introduction to debates in ethnographic theory; the application of qualitative methods in design research; techniques for data coding and analysis; as well as the politics and ethics of research.

Design is usually distinguished from art for its utility and the role it plays in people's daily lives. What happens when these works enter contexts of collecting and display like the museum? This course examines the past and future of the collection, curation, and display of works of design and material culture. Our work will involve visits to relevant collections and exhibitions as well as dialogue with curators and designers. Through assignments, students will critically reflect on current and historical exhibitions, explore collections objects collections, and develop their own visions for design exhibitions of the future.

This interdisciplinary course explores the dynamic interactions, exchanges, and conflicts that have shaped the Pacific world across time and space. Focusing on the interconnectedness of the Americas and Asias, and building upon our situatedness within the Los Angeles region, students will examine the historical, cultural, and social transformations that have resulted from these dynamic cross-cultural encounters. Through a combination of history, literature, art, design, and cultural studies, the course delves into key themes such as migration, trade, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. This course encourages critical engagement with both historical sources and contemporary cultural expressions, examining the legacies of these movements and exchanges in shaping international perspectives, diasporic communities, and modern geopolitics. By blending diverse disciplinary approaches, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the Pacific as a space of both conflict and cooperation while exploring possibilities for their practice in art and design.

This course focuses on student experiences with various forms of street art, exploring the overlaps between them and the professional worlds of art, design, and advertising. It coincides with a large, school-wide exhibition about street art, and the class will visit sites both on and off campus.

Data is all around us: COVID data, police shooting data, political polling data, app usage data, data on happiness and personality styles and future consumer trends. Where does data come from? Why do different research studies so often seem to tell different stories? How do we know when a particular study is biased-or when there are systemic cultural biases across a whole line of research? And how can we go about conducting quantitative research on our own to dig up the truth? For those working in art and design, quantitative data can be a secret weapon. It can inspire new creative thinking; it can be used as content for creative work; and it can help to accurately profile a target or validate an idea. Half understanding when data lies, and half learning about how to unearth data truths, this course will explore everything from finding big data to conducting experiments to writing effective surveys. A large portion of the class will also be dedicated to conducting a custom research project.

Introduction to Urban Studies is a course designed to address many key issues of urban life, both past and present. Starting with a general understanding of cities as collections of spaces and places shaped by human activity, the course will explore the varied forces determining the proliferation, expansion, and even decline of the urban form. Are the cities of the 21st century the cure or the cause of the many challenges facing us in the world today? How have people studied cities and how might we study them now? These questions and many others will emerge over the course's duration. Students will use this course to make the connections between topics often discussed separately, like housing, transportation, and urban politics. In addition, Introduction to Urban Studies will shine a spotlight on the modern city in the global context by linking the urban to processes of migration, investment, and environmental impact.

This course explores the impact of overpopulation, urbanization, pollution, politics, and environmental activism on the land, oceans, and atmosphere. Such topics as endangered species, biodiversity, overpopulation, animal rights, deforestation, desertification, toxic waste, global warming, ozone depletion, wetlands destruction, oceanic threats, and overgrazing will be covered. Students will be better informed to interpret complex environmental issues and apply them to their work and daily lives. They will be better prepared to have their work, either design or fine art, reflect the urgent nature of global concerns. They will also be introduced to the idea of science as the foundation of the realities facing our world today.

Environmental designers have increasingly been called upon to work with sustainable building practices by the client, the investor, and the commissioner. As a result, choices in material availability, energy type, water usage, water drainage, and fabrication methods have evolved, and new trends in environmental products and spatial designs have developed. This course will provide a historical overview of sustainable design practices as they relate to vernacular architecture and spatial environments ranging from micro-scaled building forms and interiors to macro-scaled landscapes and exterior building skins. Students will research and analyze the sustainability factor for a number of case studies while building a vocabulary and understanding of trends in sustainable building practices. Students will furthermore evaluate sustainable building practices through a variety of tools, including the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for products and the USGBC LEED accreditation system for buildings and neighborhoods.

Concerns about the economic and ecological sustainability of industrial design converge around the status of the object itself, raising questions about whether design must generate objects at all. But how might product designers create a life without objects? Using historical and contemporary sources, this course will examine a series of transdisciplinary case studies to help students explore this question. Course materials will include current dialogues around anthropogenic climate change, historical and contemporary reactions against mass production, discourses of decluttering, corporate minimalism, zero waste lifestyles, and the politics of repurposing. The goal of this course is to help students engage critically with the social, political, economic, and ideological implications of a product-centered society, and grapple with the ethical concerns around designing and making in a world full of stuff.

"Insights" is a co-requisite of the sixth-term transportation design studio. This class guides designers in the creation of innovative vehicle concepts based on a strong foundation of research. Designers learn how to create compelling conceptual frameworks, driven by unique insights and articulated in a thoughtful, meaningful context. Since this class responds to a new sponsor brief each term, our focus is customized for each project, but our process remains constant. We employ a range of design research methodologies (primary and secondary) including observation, photo-documentation, ethnography, interviews, and trend tracking and forecasting. We keep the human story at the center of what we do, while considering broader trends that impact culture. Our work is closely coordinated and integrated with the design curriculum in the sixth-term studio class.

Urban Leviathans: Opulence, Struggle, and Squalor in the Majority World will explore 21st-century urban extremes, from the globalized metropolitan region to the almost schizoid characteristics of what we once called the "developing" or "third world" but must now refer to as the "majority world"--the fast-growing cities located in or situated near the 10/40 Window. This course will provide a wide range of understandings about the nature of "majority" cities including, but not limited to, a study of the ecological ramifications of urban growth, varied security issues, the complexities of urban life, and the politics of plunder keeping stable governments from taking hold. This course is important for Art Center students, because it can give them a better sense of the non-western city in a rapidly changing, globalized context; it should help students understand urban life and many of the political, ecological, and social struggles taking shape in this majority world that we often find easy to ignore.

This course introduces a selection of artworks and artifacts from the Chinese Neolithic through the present times. It is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of Chinese art. Rather, we approach the broad topic of art from China from the perspective of construction in two senses: material culture and material technology (design). Historical case studies may include: jade, bronze, lacquer, silk, sculpture, ceramics, painting and calligraphy, and architecture. Core inquires we will discuss through reading, presentation, and discussion are: How are material objects interpreted? By connecting the history of object-making to their social, political, and cultural contexts, how do we understand plural approaches to design and materials, including those beyond the canon, across time and in the present? This section of the course focuses on the later imperial period (ca.1000 and onward).

Is the media liberal? Are all politicians in the pockets of corporations? Is dissent unpatriotic? Is the U.S. a nation to be loved or feared? Is it a democracy? An empire? Both? How are we, as citizens (of any country), to find our way through the rhetoric of the left, the right, the middle? How can we make sense out of the increasing flood of political and cultural information that bursts from our computers, televisions, radios, newspapers, and movies? Whom should we believe? This course seeks to provide the tools to help make sense of it all.

This is a class for anyone who wants to know what the hell is going on. It's going to be a week by week examination of the work of Independent Journalists, Commentators, and Organizations whose efforts, insights and information are essential to finding your way to clarity and understanding of issues and events, here and everywhere else, sometimes urgent, sometimes absurd, and often unknown, ignored or misrepresented by the Corporate Mainstream Media and the politicized press. The Instructor will provide weekly reading and examples of techniques of misinformation, insinuation and manipulative innuendo. There will be a research paper, the first draft of which will be a preparatory midterm and the final draft will be the final paper and determine the final grade.

This course will challenge students to explore the past, present, and future of democratic participation and civic engagement. Students will learn about how US elections have changed over time through analyzing the history of voting rights, civil rights, ballot technologies, media representation, and power. With knowledge partners from across the political spectrum, students will conduct primary research to learn about the contemporary landscape of civic participation in the LA metro area, envision the role design can play in the election process, and build frameworks and strategies for the future. Creative projects will invite public engagement in the political process through the creation of campaigns, collateral, systems, experiences, spaces (and more!) aimed at increasing voter participation in and beyond California.

The future of the planet is urban. It is not just that half the world's population now lives in cities, but that the vast supply-chains and infrastructures of urbanization now operate at a planetary-scale: extending under oceans and across continents, into the atmosphere and through our networked devices. The planetary city is made possible by data centers, satellite telecommunications, intermodal container shipping, fiber optic infrastructure, and continental pipelines. However, it is also a world of unfolding ecological crisis, fueled by many of these same urban processes. How can we, as artists, designers, and citizens, begin to understand our dependence on these planetary urban systems while at the same time imagining and designing for radically new forms of urban habitation? This seminar will follow the lines and flows of urban infrastructure, investigating the design of cities and their world-making impact at a new scale. The first half of the class will involve readings, films, art and architecture from the planetary city, thinking through both the material histories and the cultural dreamscapes that have propelled urban growth in the last 250 years. The second half of the class will turn to the "local" context to ground our orbital view, looking to the Southern California megaregion as a site of planetary flows of information, manufactured goods, energy, and water. Lectures and discussions around the urban metabolism of Southern California will be supplemented by field research and guest speakers. Final projects will consist of maps, diagrams, and urban analysis developed by students in groups, focusing on particular urban systems located within or through our Southern California megaregion

Different Tomorrows Assembles a counter-history of design that repositions design discourse beyond the Eurocentric, techno-deterministic normalities to reimagine future design trajectories that privilege critical engagement with questions of race, gender and inequality.

Life in the 21st century (especially in Los Angeles) is increasingly dominated by a highly complex media world, whether this be visual representations, forms of labor and the demand to earn a living, the ecological impacts of media technologies, or surveillance, to name only a few aspects. One approach to making sense of this world is through the field of media studies and History & Theory of Media & Technology will ask students to consider what "medias" are and what they do, as well as to consider the connection between medias and socio-economic issues. In this course we will examine key concepts, texts, and art works in media studies, their historical and contemporary contexts, and in terms of their relationship to gender, sexuality, racialization, class, politics, economy, and ecology. By the end of the semester students will have a strong foundation in media studies and will be asked to do a final project that examines a key concept from the course and its social and artistic significance.

Distinctions between "real" life and the cultural experiences facilitated by digital platforms are increasingly difficult to maintain. No longer spaces that merely supplement or distract from our ordinary lives, online worlds are integral to the creation and maintenance of contemporary identities, work flows, communities, and more. This class takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the variety and significance of life online. Premised on deep engagement across cultural contexts, ethnography aspires to grounded, respectful, and dialogic accounts of the everyday. Over the course of the term, students will be introduced to anthropological precedents and hands-on methods for learning about and from the digital. As global crisis forces more and more of social life online, the research tools provided in this class are of growing importance-both to scholars interested in understanding transformations to contemporary life and designers working to develop innovative and ethical solutions to collective challenges. During this course, students will learn a variety of ethnographic methods while employing them at a chosen online fieldsite. The resulting data will inform the development of a final project. Course readings and discussions will offer an introduction to debates in ethnographic theory; the application of qualitative methods in research; techniques for data analysis; as well as the politics and ethics of research.

Writing and written words are central features in Chinese visual culture, both as material and conceptual phenomena. This course introduces the intersections between practices of text and image-making through various sites of art and design from China and Asia. Through lecture, discussion, and practice, the course will study the dialectic between text and image by exploring the origins and early development of writing in China, and the relationship between word and image, narrative and illustration, diagram and planning, and visual and verbal communication. Sites include ornamental writing, poetry and paintings, sacred texts and monuments, political propaganda, and contemporary art through works by Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Taiwan). Case studies may also include examples from Korea and West-Central Asia. By considering the role of power, social, and political processes on the history of text and image-making in China and beyond, the class will explore a more expansive conception of design, making, and communication in the past and present.

Design does not unfold in a vacuum. Increasingly, the discipline is called to examine its connections to larger material, economic, and cultural networks. This class offers a window onto crucial domains hidden from the usual view from the studio to see how this broader world lives within the work of design. In dialogue with ideas from anthropology, history, economics and elsewhere and engaging in a series of collaborative projects surrounding the Los Angeles design ecology, the class will examine where design's materials come from; how these resources are transformed through varied forms of skill; and the diverse economies in which design circulates and is made meaningful. Throughout the course, students will work in close collaboration with the instructor and selected designers in the creation of original research and projects.

Stemming from the ubiquity of "Made in China" in our daily lives, this course focuses on the history of Chinese ceramics from various perspectives. Of the diverse types of ceramics that have flourished in China, porcelain from Jingdezhen has experienced the broadest reach throughout the world. A fundamental objective of the course is to provide a basic understanding of ceramics and to develop analytical skills and critical vocabulary to discuss material, style, and techniques of Chinese ceramics. This course focuses on the porcelain center of Jingdezhen and explore the nature of its global scope. Organized thematically and from cross-disciplinary perspectives, the class will analyze the impact of local resources, social organization, consumer trends, and interregional relations on the production of polychromes, imperial monochromes, narrative illustration, and fantasies and folklore. By studying porcelain from various methodologies including scientific conservation, archaeology, anthropology, material culture and art history, the class will probe how close observation of porcelain-making interrogate conventional boundaries defining art, design, and craft while at the same time challenging the whiteness of porcelain histories.

In this class we will cover what are your rights as an individual, as a member of a group, and even more specifically as an artist, designer and/or author. We will look at how these rights are articulated in the law and in social practice, and will look at how we got those rights. Guest lecturers, films and music will help us see how art, music, literature, poetry and activism lead to obtaining these civil rights. We'll also look at the threats and limitations to these rights in courts, in cities, in the workplace and in public and in private. As part of our discussions we will talk about civil rights in other countries and the current struggles around the world, and of course, at home. Course assignments will include reading articles, choices of books and poetry, watching and reviewing movies, listening to music from the formation of the United States until now all on the topic of defining, fighting for, defending and protecting the rights of individuals, minorities and groups in public and in private.

Using art, novels, movies, plays, speakers and interviews, we will learn about and compare the civil rights and human rights movements in the United States over the last 240 years. In this class we will cover the meaning of Civil Rights and Human Rights and how these developed over the history of the United States. We will look at the situation for individuals and groups that gave rise to the Civil Rights movements in the United States for African Americans, Women, LBGT community, Native Americans, Latinos/Chicanos, Immigrant Groups, Prisoners and Disabled Children and Adults. We will analyze how these groups became aware of themselves as an interest group, what their goals and strategies were and presently are; who were their leaders and other allies; what were their challenges and successes. We will look at the events, actions, arts and expression of these movements as expressed by members of the movement as well as the dominant culture by reading primary sources, hearing music, reading poetry and watching many movies.

This is an advanced multidisciplinary branding workshop that is student-directed with the support of faculty and other professionals. Each student is expected to propose a brand project to work on during the term. A collaborative project between enrolled students is acceptable, as long as the work is divided equitably among teammates. Each student is responsible for setting individual or team goals and a timeline for the term. The culture of the workshop is studio-critique style. Each student is expected to participate fully in supporting their fellow classmates' goals through contributing to peerto-peer well-considered weekly critiques. The class is divided between critical readings and discussions, relevant brand-related topics and case studies led by individual students, and individual progress presentations and feedback sessions. We will engage with other branding professionals through guest lecturers/critics and workshop visits to local branding studios.

A weekly series of critical discussions exploring the application of social psychology to the development of brands and branding strategies. Brands alter our perception of reality! The brain and the brand interact to influence our behavior. We will explore how the brain works and how brands design for it. Brands are looking for a piece of your mind and your wallet! We will explore the connection between our brains and the consumer world, including examples in social innovation. Does it make a difference if marketers are trying to persuade us to do something that is ultimately in our best interest? Who gets to decide?Branding reshapes our brains! Together we will uncover the code behind the brands (and the designs) that influence us, with or without our knowledge or consent. Come with curiosity; leave with creative strategies that leverage your understanding of the psychology of branding.

Often, the design process begins from a desire to radically transform the daily lives of its users. What would it look like if instead we prioritized understanding and supporting the everyday as it already exists? This course offers an introduction to anthropologies of everyday life; the study of material culture; and research based creative practices. In addition to engaging relevant texts and projects in a seminar format, students will work on a series of research and creative briefs around these themes in dialogue with their own interests. The course will work in active dialogue with designers, object collections, and the urban life of Los Angeles.

Data are a tool of worldmaking, reflecting and reinforcing past and present structures of power. Data also script the future. Building from that premise, this class will explore how critical approaches to data can encode alternate collective futures. With a particular focus on the role of data in art and design, we will look pair key texts on data feminism and critical data studies with works by Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Stephanie Dinkins, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Los Angeles Artist Census, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi ?n??ha, Caroline Sinders, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and others. Students will codetermine the course's assessment rubrics, and will participate in the design of the class as co-creators of curriculum through student-generated modules.

Designers rarely have access to children and teens or their worlds when creating products, images, experiences and environments for them. Therefore, fine distinctions between age transitions and the day-to-day experiences of children and teens are often overlooked. Children and teens are a complex user groups where knowledge of child development, children and youth culture today, play behavior, ethics in research and children's rights are all important to create better products, services and environments for healthy child development. This course is for students interested in expanding their research methodologies when creating diverse products and experiences for kids and teens. It is open to students of diverse disciplines that would like to learn new approaches to inform their work from a child-centered perspective. The course will include relevant theories, play exercises, guest experts and collaborative and individual assignments. It covers primary and secondary research methodologies on designing for and with children. Primary methods include observations, concept testing, interviews, surveys, focus groups, play testing, user testing, collaborative design, and post distribution and longitudinal studies. Topics for secondary research include child development theories, historical research, children and youth culture, pop culture, design culture, cross cultural perspectives, trend research, sustainable production materials and technology, safety, human factors, inclusive design, ethical business practices.

Have you ever wondered about how to connect design practice to social justice? Have you ever considered what it might take to embolden marginalized communities through design research? Have you ever wanted to reorder the ways in which benefits and burdens are distributed across society with your knowledge and skills as a designer? In this course, we will address these questions and more. In particular, it is an investigation into the theoretical, ethical, and processual orientations of participatory design research. Far from a monolithic concept, participatory design is multi-faceted, taking shape only through a constellation of histories and discourses about governance, power, and justice. Thus, course readings cover a diverse literature (e.g., book chapters, journal articles, and blogs) on the nature of participation and its relationship with design and materiality. Different from conventional courses on the topic, a review of critical frameworks rooted in feminism, postcolonialism, anti-racism, and disability studies will offer students ways to situate and reconceptualize participatory design in embodied, political and global contexts. We will cover a variety of research techniques, from crafting interview guides to developing prototypes-studying several case studies for guidance. Also, as part of this course, students will engage each other through weekly practice assignments, which will cultivate a sense of comfort and creativity with the many methodologies introduced.

This course examines how the human mind is like artificial intelligence and how it is unique. Human sensory processing, which we use to orient ourselves in the world, serves as the basis for our actions and our imaginings, and is quite different from AI. The way we extend our senses and therefore our mind into the outside world, while managing inside perceptions, creates our unique sense of embodiment. Embodiment is a hotly debated subject in the context of machine learning. We take a closer look at the emergence of memory and imaginative-predictive skills in the brain as we look towards optimizing creativity and flow states. Further, we examine the impact of imagination on human technological inventions especially in the field of computational systems and large language models. We will consider how the human mind and artificial intelligence may shape the future of science, design, and art.

With the recent rise of predictive policing and algorithmic racism in the United States, the relationship between race and technology has come to the fore. Yet, technological development, forms of racialization, and related speculations on what defines the human have been central to the development of modernity since plantation slavery and European colonization. The course will ask students to think about the ways that technological development is never neutral and has always been connected to economics and labor, histories of race, gender, and colonialism, as well as hierarchical conceptions of what it means to be human and who is included in that term. In doing so we will look at a wide array of historical documents, art works, films, and literature and consider the role of art making and aesthetic practices in both conceptualizing those histories and imagining worlds otherwise to them.

Digital devices and infrastructures have outsized implications for collective life today. Like all technologies, they are the result of coordinated human activity that produces innovation through research, business, design, and daily life. This class introduces students to the anthropological analysis of these practices, offering tools for thinking critically about the cultural contexts and impacts of emerging technology. What makes particular corners of the world famous as hotbeds of "disruptive" thinking? How do online platforms shape their users and how do users transform these platforms in turn? How does technology reflect and inform contemporary struggles over race, gender, class, colonialism, and governance? By asking questions like these, we will develop tools for understanding technology as a product of cultural practice; an agent of social change; and an object of collective deliberation. Constructed as a seminar, this course will include readings from anthropology, science and technology studies, fiction, and other fields, alongside weekly writing responses and a final design proposal.

How did the violence of the colonialism transform life across the Americas? How have the predatory and racist logics of colonialism manifested well beyond explicit acts of domination? How have practices of knowledge, art, and design perpetuated colonial relations and how might they help undo them? Together, we will consider the past and future of the Americas through stories of science and technology; art and design; environment and extraction in the (post)colonial eras. We will learn about the colonial project and its logics as well as a range of historical and contemporary strategies for dismantling colonial institutions and building alternatives. To do so, we will begin by situating ourselves in the history of the ancient and colonial Americas; examine the fall of colonial governance and its pernicious afterlives; and survey the work of Indigenous and Settler practitioners engaged in work of resistance and resurgence. Our conversations and assignments will emphasize both the scholarly analysis of colonialism as well as the implications of such thinking for our own everyday work as citizens, thinkers, artists, and designers.?

About 15% of the world's people are disabled. This statistic is more complicated than it seems, because it is determined by various bodily, societal, and cultural perceptions. What is design's role, then, in defining and responding to disability? For decades, disabled people have claimed that the social edifice-from beliefs to design standards-causes disability, not bodies. An important position for designers to consider, this course traces the curvature of such discourses and applies them to creative practice. Students will think, sketch, play, and iterate ways to make the worlds of architecture, objects, interfaces, communications, and more, access-centered. A final assignment channels course learnings into an interdisciplinary design project that extends what disability design means and can do in our current moment.

This course explores key topics in AI for artists and designers. The three-hour seminar will provide an introductory overview of the theories, histories, and debates at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. We will discuss emerging technologies that include image generators (DALL-E, Midjourney) and large language models (ChatGPT, Bard), as well as prior computational tools and their creative uses. Topics covered will include issues of authorship, multispecies collaboration, algorithmic bias, data ethics and politics, and beyond. These topics will be paired with discussion of works by artists and designers experimenting with AI. The core objective of the course will be to develop a critical understanding of the kinds of artistic futures that might emerge through and alongside artificial intelligences. Creative assignments and responses to the course material will be encouraged, in the medium of each students' choice.

This course critically examines design's normative worldview via theory, case study, research and writing. Challenging the adequacy of modernist, European value sets for contemporary design, students will explore their own worldviews, and be confronted by those of others. How can a critically engaged understanding of culture and context equip designers for productively addressing contemporary issues? In what ways does a serious consideration of context shape our understanding of materials, aesthetics, or even design itself?

What role might artists and designers play in scripting possible futures, at a moment when it has become difficult to sustain imaginaries of any future whatever? Amid conditions of ecological crisis and systemic injustice, who inscribes the future, and for whom is the future structurally foreclosed? In this scenario, artists have increasingly turned to future-oriented practices as a tactic of refusal and survival. Attending to their work, this course will examine a range of global practices spanning Afrofuturisms, Arab Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Sinofuturisms, and SWANA Futurisms, among others. Artists' projects will be paired with critical texts by Black Quantum Futurism, Grace Dillon, T. J. Demos, Kodwo Eshun, Yuk Hui, Kara Keeling, Jussi Parikka, Sofia Samatar, and others. Students will coproduce the course's assessment rubrics, and will participate in the design of the class as active co-creators of curriculum through student-generated modules.

This course continues to critically examine design's normative worldview via theory, case study, research and writing. Students will explore their own worldviews, and be confronted by those of others. Students will begin to develop their own position to productively address contemporary issues through writing and reflection on their burgeoning design practice in preparation for the independent research of the thesis year.

This course explores key topics in AI for artists and designers. The three-hour seminar will provide an introductory overview of the theories, histories, and debates at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. We will discuss emerging technologies that include image generators (DALL-E, Midjourney) and large language models (ChatGPT, Bard), as well as prior computational tools and their creative uses. Topics covered will include issues of authorship, multispecies collaboration, algorithmic bias, data ethics and politics, and beyond. These topics will be paired with discussion of works by artists and designers experimenting with AI. The core objective of the course will be to develop a critical understanding of the kinds of artistic futures that might emerge through and alongside artificial intelligences. Creative assignments and responses to the course material will be encouraged, in the medium of each students' choice.

What role might artists and designers play in scripting possible futures, at a moment when it has become difficult to sustain imaginaries of any future whatever? Amid conditions of ecological crisis and systemic injustice, who inscribes the future, and for whom is the future structurally foreclosed? In this scenario, artists have increasingly turned to future-oriented practices as a tactic of refusal and survival. Attending to their work, this course will examine a range of global practices spanning Afrofuturisms, Arab Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Sinofuturisms, and SWANA Futurisms, among others. Artists' projects will be paired with critical texts by Black Quantum Futurism, Grace Dillon, T. J. Demos, Kodwo Eshun, Yuk Hui, Kara Keeling, Jussi Parikka, Sofia Samatar, and others. Students will coproduce the course's assessment rubrics, and will participate in the design of the class as active co-creators of curriculum through student-generated modules.

TestlabBerlin is a sponsored studio abroad project. One core faculty member will run the project for the entire semester, additionally there will be guest faculty/lecturers/guest critics in Berlin. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Students will experiment with new creative strategies for art & design production which will be informed by real-time response from a chosen audience. This feedback process will be enabled both through social media (Socialtecture) and through in-person interaction with the audience. The resulting projects are cross-cultural in nature and dramatically broaden the creative horizon of all participants.

TestlabBerlin is a sponsored studio abroad project. One core faculty member will run the project for the entire semester, additionally there will be guest faculty/lecturers/guest critics in Berlin. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Students will experiment with new creative strategies for art & design production which will be informed by real-time response from a chosen audience. This feedback process will be enabled both through social media (Socialtecture) and through in-person interaction with the audience. The resulting projects are cross-cultural in nature and dramatically broaden the creative horizon of all participants.

TestlabBerlin is a sponsored studio abroad project. One core faculty member will run the project for the entire semester, additionally there will be guest faculty/lecturers/guest critics in Berlin. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Students will experiment with new creative strategies for art & design production which will be informed by real-time response from a chosen audience. This feedback process will be enabled both through social media (Socialtecture) and through in-person interaction with the audience. The resulting projects are cross-cultural in nature and dramatically broaden the creative horizon of all participants.

This TDS will explore the "Future of Sports" in Berlin - a city that has a significant history in sporting events and a culture that continually redefines what sport means to its individuals and the community. The project will be sponsored by Adidas and Canyon Bikes with potential other sponsors. Topics to be explored include: future concepts in footwear, apparel, equipment, branded events and retail, digital interaction, etc. that will redefine the future performance and participation in sports. The project will leverage the immersion into the Berlin culture and interacting with local experts, sponsors and designers. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Experience working in trans-disciplinary teams. Immersion into the unique Berlin culture to inspire project direction. Conceptual development of future-forward vision-casting ideas. Interacting with professionals from sponsoring organizations.

OPPORTUNITY: Envision Charity Shop System Envision a system of thrift shops to support pediatric burn treatment. Nonprofit charity shops are a new phenomenon in Chile, and have a huge potential to raise funds to support free treatment, while building a community of socially engaged volunteers. Interdisciplinary student teams will propose real world solutions: . Retail: charity shop spatial design / furniture & lighting / pop-up shops . Branding & Marketing: promotion for customers, donors, volunteers . Systems & Strategy: supply chain for donations / online store MISSION: Free Pediatric Burn Treatment Partner with COANIQUEM, a leading nonprofit that provides free holistic treatment to children across Latin America who have survived severe burns. FIELD RESEARCH: 2 Weeks, Santiago, Chile Travel to COANIQUEM's pediatric burn center in Santiago, Chile, to understand their mission & research opportunities for charity retail

By application only OPPORTUNITY: Students will co-create with kids, families, and staff to design innovative healing environments for child burn survivors at Coaniquem's campuses across Chile. Interdisciplinary student teams will propose real world solutions: Engaging environments that are welcoming and Therapeutic, as well as fun and interactive. MISSION: Develop high impact solutions and resourceful innovations for real world implementation at Coaniquem. FIELD RESEARCH: 2 Weeks in Chile: Travel first to the main COANIQUEM's pediatric burn center in Santiago to understand their mission and learn first hand from previous Safe Niños collaborations. Then travel to their other two locations in Chile: Antofagasta and Puerto Montt to understand the challenges and opportunities from these two pediatric centers located in the North and the South areas of the country. We will seek for opportunities to make an impact while building deep connections with people.

Germans are obsessed with health and wellness. As a 25-billion-euro industry, it is more than a trend. In Berlin, it is a movement, led by millennials who are re-thinking how it integrates in every aspect of their daily lives. From yoga in Tiergarten to taking the waters at Liquidrom, to consuming garden fresh smoothies in Prinzessinnengarten, Berliners covet their ability to create a mind body spirit connection that is unique to them. Food and fitness play an equal role in a healthy lifestyle here. Organic, locally grown foods in cafes are a staple as baristas concoct finely tuned smoothies as cocktails, powering a boutique cycling studio, while gym goers consume specially tuned soundscapes that are designed to increase their focus and agility. Experience is supreme in Berlin. The body is in balance.

Students are challenged to look at the next incarnation of the Co-Working trend, examining possible hybrids that engage all of our senses and offer opportunities to redefine the future of work. They will look at the psychological and social aspects of Berliners more entrepreneurial attitude ti different kinds of work - and how to construct meaningful physical environments around them to deliver the most effective impact.

This course is a workshop-style course founded on language acquisition across the four domains of language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and on the fundamentals of academic English to prepare English-emergent students for college-level writing courses at ArtCenter. English Language - Emerging (EL - Emerging) covers development of college vocabulary, reading comprehension, and grammar for academic writing-from the basics of parts of speech to fluency in the four types of sentences (simple to compound-complex). The course also includes instruction in oral communication (e.g., Visual Thinking Strategies [VTS]) in order to develop confidence in speaking, individuality in perception, and objectivity in discussion. The overall goal is to enable students to express complex ideas about art and design with clarity and precision utilizing all four language domains-listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

This course is a workshop-style course founded on language acquisition across the four domains of language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and on the fundamentals of academic language to prepare students who are continuing their development of English for college-level writing courses at ArtCenter. English Language - Developing (EL -Developing) follows the English Language - Emerging (EL - Emerging) course in sequence. This course continues to address the development of college vocabulary, reading comprehension, and grammar for academic writing building from fluency in the four types of sentences (simple to compound-complex) and extending to an understanding of the writing process to construct paragraphs and short, academic papers. The overall goal is to enable students to express complex ideas about art and design with clarity and precision utilizing all four language domains-listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, more emphasis is given to speaking (oral presentations) and writing (academic papers) in this course.

This course is tailored to Art Center students and promotes fluency in the discourses of art and design as well as overall critical thinking skills. Most course readings address topics in art, design, or consumer culture. The assignments ask students to write in a range of contexts, make oral presentations, review grammar as needed, and build design-related vocabulary. Over the semester each student will complete a variety of exercises that support the writing and revision of three to four essays. The "intensive" version of the class provides additional support for student efforts with an extra two-hour online lab each week. Specific lab modules are to be completed as assigned by the Writing Studio: Intensive instructor. The lab is designed to supplement the in-class instruction of academic college-level writing. Lab modules consist of supplementary instructional support in several aspects of academic college-level writing including the writing process, research practices, grammar, and academic discourse. Self-monitored assessments will provide student feedback and highlight both success and growth areas to facilitate and prioritize student learning goals.

This course is tailored to Art Center students and promotes fluency in the discourses of art and design as well as overall critical thinking skills. Most course readings address topics in art, design, or consumer culture. The assignments ask students to write in a range of contexts, make oral presentations, review grammar as needed, and build design-related vocabulary. Over the semester each student will complete a variety of exercises that support the writing and revision of three to four essays. The "intensive" version of the class provides additional support for student efforts with an extra two hour section each week.

In this course, English Language Learners develop proficiency in English Language reading, speaking, and writing as it relates to graduate level discourse and critique.

TestlabBerlin is a sponsored studio abroad project. One core faculty member will run the project for the entire semester, additionally there will be guest faculty/lecturers/guest critics in Berlin. Available to fifth term and above students by application. Real-life design challenge in a studio setting. Project is funded by Art Center and supplemented by a consortium of outside partners.

Part studio class, part academic seminar, Social Critique takes a sobering look at our present world. Crashing through the clichés and inspirational messaging of today's "change agents," the seminar section focuses on the social, political, and economic forces eroding democracy and consolidating oligarchic powers around the world. Topics include the parallels between the present and the Gilded Age; the anti-sociality of social media; the psychic conditions of post-futurity and neo-feudalism, and the neo-liberal global economy of precarity. The studio section of the class explores cases of critical art-making from the recent past. The cases range across media: performance art; art in public spaces and sculptural objects; body art; film/video/TV; social media; posters; graphics and multiples; architecture and furniture design, as well as painting and drawing. Students will be expected to write bi-weekly short papers in response to the assigned readings and artworks shared in class. Students will submit a final assignment, which can be either an art project or a research paper.

Black babies born in Los Angeles County are three times more likely than white babies to die before their first birthday, and Black moms are four times more likely than white moms to die of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. The truth is that the gap in mortality rates between black and white babies has existed for decades. And it has not budged. Research is showing systemic racism, lack of midwifery care options, and lack of midwives & doulas of color as the causes for these shocking disparities. In response to the black maternity health crisis effecting black birthing people in this country, Kindred Space LA, which opened to the public in 2018, offers complete midwifery care creating space for the physical, emotional and practical preparation for birth and life with a newborn. Kindred Space LA is the only Black owned birthing center in Los Angeles. Located in South Los Angeles, Kindred Space LA is a fully operational birthing center and clinical training site for students serving the community of color. Women of color were more likely to say they were treated unfairly during birth and more than half said they'd be interested in midwifery care for future pregnancies. America's black babies are paying for society's ills. What can we do as designers to fix it? In this Designmatters and Humanities+Sciences co-hosted studio, students will collaboratively design comprehensive multi-modal awareness campaigns with the goal of facilitating access to equitable child birthing experiences, increasing awareness around black midwifery and improving health outcomes while addressing the Black Maternal health crisis in America.

In continued partnership with Kindred Space Los Angeles, students will collaboratively further design established comprehensive multi-modal awareness campaigns with the goal of facilitating access to equitable child birthing experiences, increasing awareness around black midwifery and improving health outcomes while addressing the Black Maternal health crisis in America.

Prada pulls racist trinkets. Netflix airs transphobic special. Cannes awards gender-biased ads. What do these headlines tell us? Brands are every bit as social as they are commercial. Viewed through the lens of identity, brands hold the power to exploit, marginalize, and even create social identities. Similarly, brands play a vital-and sometimes violent-role in defining the "other," blurring the line between profit and politics. In this studio, students learn how to read brands as belief systems that inscribe social codes. Lecture content and course readings draw on the fields of psychology, political theory, brand strategy, and more to underscore how brands like Prada, Netflix, Cannes (and more) affect race, gender, and class relations, among myriad other sociopolitical categories. Student teams translate course learnings into a brand identity system of their making that resists negative social stereotypes. They may also find some new identities of their own in the process. This course is eligible for the Designmatters Minor in Social Innovation.

In this Design Matters TDS, students will zero in on possible futures of DEAD MALLS. We start by asking two key questions. First: Should dead, unused suburban malls be resurrected or remain ancient commercial ruins of twentieth century spatial planning? Second: If they are to be resurrected, what if Dead Malls could be turned into Healthy Space - healthy for living, learning, working, healing and play? Given the urban and suburban complexity the topic, we will learn from guest speakers, panel discussions, field trips and workshops regarding how to transforming large scale "dead" and unused architecture into viable community-centers, such as, Equity housing, Community health centers, educational centers for Green Living or Entertainment Centers. Our focus will be on healthy options - healthy for people, planet and profit. This course is eligible for the Designmatters Minor in Social Innovation

What does it mean for design to be beautiful, or to be considered "good"? How do aesthetics fit into design for social change? While aesthetics are often associated with ideas of style or beauty, the study of aesthetics has expanded to include analyzing many forms of sensory experience in relation to values, taste, and power. The Aesthetics of Power will explore the social forces shaping design knowledge and practice while examining how knowledge and resources reproduce cultural, social, and ecological imbalances. This studio course will challenge students to apply what they learn in order to build more sophisticated design and research methods. This course is eligible for the Designmatters Minor in Social Innovation