PGTD
5220
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Fall 2011
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Faculty:
Patricia Beirne,
Jamer Hunt
Building off of the research methods and practices developed during the second-semester course Design-led Research, this thesis preparation course requires students to develop a large but focused design-led research project, which emerges from their research interests. Students initiate and outline their project during the first semester of their second year and devote the majority of their final semester to it. The course culminates in a public Thesis Statement presentation, which articulates the scope and scale of the research project, demonstrates its relevance to an external community or public, and identifies the members of the thesis committee. The thesis committee must include at least one New School faculty member and two external advisors. Throughout the course, the instructor reviews how to compose a masters thesis, document the strengths and weaknesses of past thesis projects, and craft a research project that is innovative, original, and appropriate. Projects in MFA Transdisciplinary Design are collaborative; thesis students must form a teamwhether with other students or with people outside the programthat serves as the basis of this collaborative effort. This course emphasizes early production sketches, prototypes, and other forms of visualization and materialization that reinforce the design-led emphasis of the thesis project. The course also works in parallel with the Professional Communication course, where students map a professional community and identify their roles as designers within it. This exercise informs the thesis preparation process, and students are expected to be able to explicitly connect their research and project with an external community.
