The Department of Graphic Design offers a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts program, with the opportunity to pursue a fifth year of study leading to the Bachelor of Graphic Design degree. It also offers a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. Additionally, RISD Graphic Design offers workshops and credit-bearing courses during the summer.
Concrete Books
Junior, Senior, Fifth-Year, Graduate Elective – 3 credits
Fall 2008
This course uses the book to explore a range of visual phenomena and personal experiences, and how these serve to express and stimulate various levels of consciousness (sense, emotion, thought, and inspiration). Via the constant production of bookworks we will question convention and habit, experiment, stimulate poetic insight, inquire into the nature of design as a contemplative practice (mindful design), and pursue the poetic experience of the artifact. We will especially look into Concretism (cf. van Doesburg, Kandinsky, Arp, Max Bill and others): the theory that seeks out the beneficence of intelligence from the artist, artifact and user; its influence in poetry, music, and performance art; and parallel inquiries by individuals and groups like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Fluxus and other avant-garde interests that go beyond the “post-modern” mind from conceptualism to dissonance and indeterminacy to the implicate order of wholeness.
Taught by: Thomas Ockerse
Course #: GRAPH 3255
Graphic Design majors only