ART-259 History of Design

GER: VP (Visual and Performing Arts)
This course is a survey of significant developments in the history of design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Students will explore a variety of objects and visual designs, including those belonging to categories like furniture, interior design, the decorative arts, graphic design, and illustration. They will study the formal, material, and iconographic character of diverse patterns and images, objects, and buildings while practicing how to situate these works within their broader socio-cultural and historical contexts to determine their significance for the communities who conceived, produced, and originally experienced them. Weekly course topics will focus on how issues of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and colonization have affected the aesthetic and technological developments along with the reception of design. Special emphasis will also be given to examining the strategies and principles of graphic design as an instrument for visual rhetoric, particularly as it relates to global commercialism and consumerism as well as propaganda and protest. 4 credits.