Course Overview
Graduate Seminar II combines reading, writing, and critical inquiry as means to identify, explore, develop, and reflect upon areas of interest that you’ll pursue in the subsequent thesis course. This class looks both back to foundational principles and forward to a developing critical position through the construction of a reasoned, edited, and well-designed working thesis proposal. You are tasked with examining the dialogic relationship between your visual and verbal body of work. What is the interaction between the two? How does one inform the other? In turn, how is this relationship articulated in your projects, your position and identity, and your overall practice?
Unfolding in multiple stages, the seminar provides a basis for thesis development and critical positioning, along with strategies for clear and effective written communication.
Assignments & Reading
Assignments will vary from week to week. Formats include: informal and formal presentations, critical reflections, essays, process documentation, proposals, and a group interview with designers of your choosing. Each week, you will find your deliverables under “For Next Week” in Canvas and in the Schedule. All details of major assignments (Locating Territories, the Compendium, Thesis Show-and-Tell) are here.Readings will be made available as PDFs, links and scans. Please annotate them in a style of your choosing each week. Highlight key passages and map overlaps between readings in terms of theme, content, and relevance to your topic explorations.
Why these readings? Must we? The readings are intended to provoke ideas, sharpen debate, and provide entry points into the variety of ways you might approach the formulation and writing of your thesis. They are not the central linchpin of this class, but portals. You’re expected to complete all readings and come to class prepared to discuss them. Further, the Leading Readings role is intended to help each of you have a chance to distill complex ideas into pithy presentation form that is engaging, fresh, and interesting. There’s no text that cannot be punched up or given life anew: whether by rooting it in the present, reframing its ideas, or recontextualizing it. Each week, we will have a brief “Notes on a Theme” in which NK will review the main ideas of the readings in relation to your task, of articulating, presenting, and framing ideas in your evolving practice design methodology.
That is to say: the readings are not inert texts delivering information down from on high. They are meant to be live wires. Their ideas, alternately activated, used, critiqued, or discarded.
Thesis Compendium
The seminar culminates in the production of an individual Thesis Compendium, which contains: research, writing, and investigations toward your thesis year; a possible outline for deeper inquiry; and a working thesis proposal. A more full overview of the Thesis Compendium is here. We will be discussing details of compendium many times over the semester, including the different forms it can take (including a website).Note on Writing
Writing might not be your favorite task; writing is taught to be intimidating, almost unapproachable. Long loom the memories of term papers, research papers, degree projects, reports, essays, marked red. Further, the worth of writing might not seem immediately useful for one’s design practice or portfolio. But - as you know - writing is essential to the Compendium and Thesis process. Our Graduate Seminar II aims to make space for a style of writing that suits you, that you take total ownership of and agency in relation to. Your ideas and your words matter deeply, and we will work to protect, elevate, and encourage each other through sharing our writing openly, without care for perfection, and with more of a focus on communication of ideas that are meaningful to each of us.To get us comfortable with writing towards the thesis book, we will approach writing as a tool, as a tool that you use to support your practice. The language that will emerge, week by week, will be encouraged to stem from your personal and specific interests in design and other fields: artistic practice, music, film, architecture. You name it; you can write it. I am committed to encouraging experimental styles, play, and a relentless search of the forms, language, and methods of writing that suit you and your design practice. Early on, we will be diving into collective writing in-class, with a stress on delighting in our in-process ideas, mess, and continual revision. Indulge in this Writing process; see how a narrative emerges along the way.
Visitors to Us
We are lucky to have some wonderful designers joining us for conversation this semester. So far, David Rudnick and Prem Krishnamurthy have confirmed their visits to our humble seminar. The goal of their visits is not to deliver a portfolio talk, but instead, to be in conversation with you on your design thinking and practice. They’ve also been asked to speak on the continual evolution of one’s research interests and design research methodology over many years. I hope for these conversations to be fruitful for you as you develop your interests in your Compendium. (Potentially one more visitor to be announced!)Dialogues: A Collective Interview
Working in one of four groups, you will each research, prepare, and interview a designer of your group’s choosing. Details on Dialogues: A Collective Interview here.Weekly Presentations
Once during the semester, each student will lead group discussion of a particular reading. Since everyone will have read the text in question, it is important not to give a summary, but to provide additional background, context, and pointed questions for discussion. These discussions are led with a visual presentation in the form of slides, handouts, audio, and/or any other relevant formats/media/materials.Grading
- 35% Attendance, participation in and contribution to discussions
- 40% Assignments + weekly presentations
- 25% Final Thesis Compendium