Beautiful Objects

Prerequisites: ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING: ARTDES 241: Intro to Product Design, ARTDES 260: Intro to Sculpture.

Description: To address the lack of emphasis that aesthetic beauty generally receives in 21^st century design education, this studio unabashedly and specifically focuses on the creation of beautiful objects. As such, we de-emphasize (but do not altogether ignore) the many other crucial qualities like usability, manufacturability, utility, affordability, marketability, understandability, and intellectual concept. Students choose from existing product categories or archetypes (or perhaps an ​“ugly” past project of theirs) and throughout the semester focus on full-scale, iterative, physical, looks-like prototyping — again and again. Students must have the stomach for rigorous refinement directed by the eye and delivered by the hands. To undergird this process, students research beauty as a concept and as extant objects to help develop their own understandings, approaches, and standards. Students should emerge from the course with improved aesthetic sensibilities as well as abilities, evidenced in a portfolio-ready project.

Frequency: This course is typically offered in the winter term of odd-numbered years, though scheduling may vary according to future term circumstances.