Second Year Graduate Studio

This semester will introduce opportunities to rigorously explore forms of inquiry and research, leading to broad experimentation with one’s creative process while helping you get a hold of who you are, what you believe in, and what you care about in terms of content and formal issues.

Our main objective is to develop who you are as a designer while using inquiry and research as catalysts for your critical thinking and creative process. Additionally, this is a moment for you to reflect on and orient yourself to the current realities we are confronting in the world, which is the measure of a successful designer.

You will build on previous experiences and delve into unfamiliar territories. Guided by me, your peers, and outside critics, you will develop the foundation and framework of your thesis through a series of inquiry-based projects, a formal professional presentation, and several challenging form-making assignments, culminating in a design brief and semester-end reviews.

Program learning outcomes are assessed with the rubric under Assessment: Process, Master Key Principles, Authorship, Design Agility, History & Context, and Professionalism.

Class as Community

I come into this class from a place of respect and trust, and I hope that you all do too.

We are a microcosm — of the department, the school, the university, and while small, we are still an incredibly diverse community. Our cohort includes students from all over the world with all sorts of backgrounds and experiences.

Our class is inclusive and accessible — We come from different places, backgrounds, and walks of life. We embrace the unique identities of each member of this community and commit to learning, growing, and understanding each other through historical contexts of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and other expressions of self.

I understand that your trust is earned. I am committed to helping you grow and learn and change or solidify your perspective and knowledge in design, and I am committed to learning from you. I will ensure that our class is a safe space to teach and learn, as I see all of us working in both capacities.

We will explore diverse content. I am working to ensure that this course represents a vast range of perspectives, ideas, topics, people, and cultures through what I will provide and what I hope you all will bring to the conversation. I will also strive to elevate your voices in this class through the project work and the conversation.

We will be flexible, patient, and understanding. I made a syllabus and a schedule of projects. I will shift and adjust the work and the due dates to adapt to our class. There is understandable uncertainty coming into this semester. Let’s commit to the experience and see where it takes us.

Thesis Groups + Virtual Critics

I have organized you all into four groups of 4–5 students. You will meet with your group outside of class meetings and coordinate and conduct four sessions throughout the semester with an outside critic assigned to your group.

All of the outside critics are BU alumni: Nicholas Samendinger (NYC), Daria Nikolaeva (Moscow), Molly Haig (Vermont / traveling in Europe), graduates of our MFA; Mohammed Nassem (LA) is a graduate of our undergrad, with his MFA from RISD.

These groups intentionally bridge both sections to ensure you have an alternate structure to see and hear from each other, thus taking advantage of the entire group so that we don’t become too small and siloed. Our goal is to exchange lots of ideas, thoughts, questions, and conversations.

The Work

00 — Thesis Journal (weekly, prompted through Basecamp). What things have you found or looked at, or thought of this week? — something you want to do next, what inspired you, what did you hate — or maybe: my thesis is __ fill in the blank (a series of projects exploring x; an exploration of space; rebranding gender, etc.).

01 — Form. This semester will include two form-making projects running in parallel to the broader inquiry and thesis development work. These projects will keep you making experimental forms and express ideas related to your thesis work (or not) that appear along the way. We will ask you to begin aligning and organizing yourself in relation to what interests and influences you. You will develop a more profound sense of your own identity as a designer and be better able to frame questions and lines of inquiry on your own.

02 — Inquiry. We will work through two distinct but complementary forms of inquiry that are intentionally sequential, the first building a sort of foundation for the second. Each requires a deliverable — a designed research document of sorts. You may choose what format this takes within some guidelines. You should see it as an asset for you to use and build upon, something you can refer back to, and something that can inform someone who has no idea about your work. We will ask that you begin to fully develop a coherent perspective on both the visual and verbal languages you utilize to discover and articulate your thesis while continually questioning design as it relates to your view and values. Synthesize, connect the dots, draw connections, compile insights, and begin to apply your thinking.

03 — Form + Inquiry. Using content you are generating through inquiry and form making, along with insights gleaned from this process, you will work on two projects combining form and inquiry. You will catalog and analyze what you have made, collected, saved, archived, or bookmarked to date. And begin to look for the appearance of formal strategies or ideas that are the threads or connections between everything.

A — Form: Remix

Individual · 3 weeks · 9/14–10/07

A project about recontextualizing content, ideas, and form.

B — Inquiry: Filter of Perspective

Individual · 5 weeks · 9/14–10/20

Develop a content specific cultural landscape; text-based (written or spoken) content, issues, points of view, values that are important to you, that you live by, that define your identity. Include reference points such as links to articles or videos, for example. What is your reading list, your bookmarks, your playlists? Determine and design the best format for cataloging and presenting this cultural landscape.

Work, influences, and inspiration. Begin by cataloging, analyzing what you have made to date, collected, saved, archived, or bookmarked. What formal strategies or ideas appear? Look for the threads or connections between everything. Try to extract five and define each of these in your own words. Your output should be a designed digital collection organized in some way according to the emergent formal strategies.

C — Form + Inquiry: Insights Presentation

Individual · 3 weeks · 9/28–10/20

Try to extract five and define each of these in your own words. Your output should be a designed digital collection organized in some way according to the emergent formal strategies. Across two evenings of presentations you will formally deliver a presentation of insights stemming from the work developed from your Summer Letter to your Filter of Perspective. You will write a script and design a set of visuals to accompany the script. You will present this in front of your peers and mentors (virtually).

D — Form: Extreme Scale

Individual · 3 weeks · 10/26–11/18

A project about shifting understanding and perspective.

E — Inquiry: 50 Questions

Individual · 4 weeks · 10/26–11/23

You will begin to develop a research methodology based on conceptual and formal questions as a design process for this project. You will research and explore new content by creatives, authors, thought leaders, and others within and outside of design to help develop internal and external questions as practicing designers.

F — Form + Inquiry: Thesis Taxonomy + Methods

Individual · 4 weeks · 11/09–12/09

How can you begin to define your thesis idea and frame its references in a language we understand? Begin to develop a taxonomy of the language and terminology that have emerged from the beginning of the semester. It would be best if you additionally defined or described this terminology. Support this taxonomy with references, such as links, examples, or case studies. Create a statement or series of statements as formal strategies that can begin to link, connect, or unify your findings. What patterns appear? What connections do you see across each form of inquiry? Once you have drafted your statement, generate a project representing this formal strategy or strategies.

Program Learning Outcomes

• Basecamp — weekly Thesis Journal prompts and class communication.