Create and design at Department of Art + Design this fall. Please contact instructor if students outside of Art+Design have any issues with registering for these courses. 

Interdisciplinary Arts Courses

ARTE 5901.06 – Special Topics: Art of Environmental Action
CRN 18001, Thursday, 1:35-5:05 PM
Professor Sarah Kanouse
Learn to use art and design for environmental action! Design a civic media/activist art project on climate change while critically exploring a broad range of creative responses to ecological crisis. No pre-req and prior experience in art is required.

ARTE 5901 – Special Topics: Video Basics
CRN 16543 – Monday, 1:35-5:05 PM
Professor David Tames
Explore the moving image as an art form while you learn fundamental techniques and aesthetics of contemporary video production.

ARTD 6001 – Art, Media, Participation I
CRN 18092, Wednesday, 6-9:30 PM
Sarah Kanouse
Use creative media to foster audience interaction and public engagement. Interdisciplinary, graduate-level studio/seminar supports advanced research-creation in the arts.

ARTE 6210 – Research Methods for the Creative Arts (Theoretical Approaches to the Visual Arts)
CRN 18091
Tuesday, Friday, 9:50-11:30 AM
Professor Nicholas Brown
What is artistic research? Understand the methods that underpin practice-based research in today’s interdisciplinary creative landscape and get a jump start on your graduate thesis.

Information Design and Visualization, Design Courses

ARTG 5130.01 Visual Comm for Info Design
CRN 14370, Wednesday 1:35-5:05PM
Explores graphic and typographic theory, principles, and practices. Introduces students to visual communication design with a primary focus on typography as the fundamental means of conveying content. Readings locate design and typography within the larger history of visual art and writing development. Covers methods of organizing content through hierarchy and spatial organization of grid structures. Considers relationships between positive and negative space, depth perception, transparency, and color theory.

ARTG 5330.01 Visualization Technologies
CRN 14311, Friday 1:35-5:05PM

ARTG 5330.02 Visualization Technologies
CRN 14311, Friday 1:35-5:05PM OR
CRN 18068, Tuesday 6:00-9:30PM
Introduces programming languages that allow computational analysis and digital delivery of dynamic information. Examines implications of environmental and personal sensor data sources, mobile collection and analysis of data, real-time networked data sets, and social use of shared data visualization tools.

ARTG 5620.01 Notational Systems for Experience
CRN 18069, Monday 6:00-9:30PM
Examines theoretical foundations, concepts, and methods of visual notational systems used in the effective analysis and communication of existing experiences and in the envisioning of conditions for future experiences. Notational systems are sets of graphic signs and codes that denote or prescribe specific actions, forces, operations, events, or performances that occur over time. Students engage with concepts and models through readings, discussion, case study analyses, and speculative design projects. Evaluates the role that notational systems play in documenting, analyzing, and understanding the human goals, actions, behaviors, and perceptions key to experience and assesses their value in designing for agency and new experiences.

ARTG 6310.01 Design for Behavior/Experience
CRN 16101, Wednesday 6:00-9:30PM
Examines the potential of interfaces as mediators between information and users. Explores iterative prototyping and research methods to analyze patterns of behavior and implications of interface on effective communication. Utilizes observation, empathy, ethnography, and participatory design methods to offer students an opportunity to increase their understanding of audiences’ and stakeholders’ motivations and expectations.

ARTG 6900.01 ST: Information Visualization Principles and Practices
CRN 18071, Tuesday 6:00-9:30PM
Provides a historical background and contextual analysis of pioneering visualization models and techniques used in visualization. Through lectures and discussions examines the multitude of visualization models and how they interact among each other, and the prevailing traces that connect them. These models are examined through visual cognition theory. Written and sketch assignments encourage reflection and analysis of the uses of various visualization models. Students explore the following questions: on a semiotic level, what visual variables should be used to optimize the decoding of a certain type of information? What are the general rules of thumb when designing information graphics? When is there a reason to break these rules?

ARTG 6900.02 ST: Beautiful Science
CRN:18077, Thursday 1:35-5:05PM
Science communication is experiencing a renaissance, thanks to increasingly advanced visualization and interaction techniques. In this course, we will explore the variety of formats that science communication can take, from freehand drawings of the first scientists to the most modern techniques of “Augmented Reading”, and “Reactive Documents”. We will see how to create tools that encourage active reading, studying some of the most well-known experiments of “Explorable Explanations” and “Interactive Data-Movie”. Students will then apply these strategies in their own science communication projects. Explorations performed through easy to use application, without the need to program.