Pedagogy · Colin Owens
Has taught at RISD, MassArt, AIB, and Lesley — design as systems and multimodal practice
The Premise
Twenty years of teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, the Art Institute of Boston, and Lesley University. Two courses are featured in full: Visual Systems at RISD and Sound Design for Dynamic Media at MassArt. Three more — Design Systems, Visual Research, and a two-semester Information Architecture sequence — follow in the index.
Featured · Systems
The state of being able to see a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole.
Many modern visual communications are produced within media systems that operate in the context of social systems. The designer must learn how to evaluate and understand their work as a system within these complexes — in the context of others, of social and eventually global systems. Successful systems have inherent cognitive and visual logic which the designer must understand in order to modify a part of an existing system or create anew.
What we create has tremendous impact not only on what other people see, but how they see. Patterns of behavior, form, and method are interconnected processes that contribute to our visual output and help us to understand and interpret the world as we experience it.
Human beings are intrinsically organizers and pattern seekers because there is an apparent drive within us toward wholeness and integration, toward a sense of order, harmony and unity in everything. What's more, when we identify any unifying relationship and sense this wholeness, that not only informs us but makes us feel good. — Tom Ockerse
To gain a general understanding and appreciation of systems for design in order to:
The course is a sequence of structured exercises. Studio production is the emphasis. Students maintain a personal documentation that locates a record of hand-outs, visual studies and experiments, notes on lectures, seminars, critiques, reading, and reflection — that record becomes part of the final submission.
Exercise 01
Pattern as a System
In teams of three. Design a single "module" unit — square, divided about equally in black and white. Keep the design simple. Repeat the module into a squared grid of 5×5 (25 units) or 6×6 (36 units). Vary repetition. Vary the systems for repetition. Each team presents nine final studies, with a simple notation system to show the operating system(s). Then select one pattern as a base and systematically substitute black and white parts with color (hue, value, saturation), without altering the module or base pattern.
Exercise 02
Telegraph
Create a spread (two 8.5×11 pages side-by-side) with a root-3 grid using a given text (the lyrics to A Day in the Life) and a series of given images. I will not tell you how to use the grid; it is entirely up to you. Write a set of instructions on how to reproduce the layout to exacting specifications, pass them to another student, and execute the set you receive in return.
Exercise 03
Learning to Love You More — A System of Framing Systems
Create a series of layouts using photographic and written material the student has authored: a photograph every four hours awake for the next week; 100 words on each of three personal prompts (your funniest experience at RISD, your best childhood memory, a hidden talent); plus three class-sourced topics. Design a modular grid (single column, multi-column, hang line). Produce three 8.5×11 spreads using all of the material. The chicken-and-egg problem is intentional; find a way to compensate.
Exercise 04
Oblique Strategies — Chance & Sequence
After Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Drawing constraints from a fixed set, the student introduces chance into the studio process.
Exercise 05
Your Model
A multi-week culminating project. The student designs and presents their own systemic model.
Featured · Multimodal
A course that examines the use of sound in communication design and dynamic media. Through lecture, demonstration, and in-depth exploration, students learn the fundamentals of sound design and musical structure in temporal and spatial dimensions.
The Dynamic Media context is load-bearing: sound here is treated as a programmatic, dynamic medium — generated, manipulated, and delivered as part of a time-based system, not added as a finishing layer on top of finished work. The course pushes sound creation and manipulation, the musical structures of sound (harmony, pitch, tone, rhythm), and sound as a primary communication medium — composed at the level of structure and behavior, not just selection and arrangement.
Course content is delivered in the form of two projects and several shorter explorations. Forms of instruction include class critiques, discussions, lectures, demonstrations and hands-on tutorials, reading, and listening.
Course Index
Design Systems — Graphic Design III
Most visual communications today are produced and published within media systems that operate in the context of social systems. The graphic designer must learn how to discover the structure of systems, determine interactions within them, and evaluate and respond to feedback in pursuit of a client's goals. The studio includes an introduction to systems theory, media systems, and the systematic application of visual design to practical possibilities of human communication. Students read basic texts on system theory, analyze situations in which visual systems operate, and produce tangible projects that apply visual communication systems theory and practice to real-life goals.
Visual Research — Graphic Design I
A course in observation, internalization, and dissemination. Qualitative methods of looking, comparing, abstracting, containing, and understanding — developing the student's sense of I and eye. Students learn how a designer's choice is affected by taste, fashion, lineage, culture, and audience, and how context changes perception. Foundational concepts of semiotic theory related to graphic design are introduced. Critical and divergent thinking — the ability to produce infinite options — is explored.
Information Architecture I & II
We live in the information age — not necessarily the "meaning" age. The first semester works together to better understand the dense information culture we live in; the relationship between data, information, and meaning; methods for organizing information; the visual representation of information; the principles of information design; and how to make information meaningful. Principles discussed: data, content, relationships, structure, organization, variability, systems, programs, filters, algorithm, user experience, interface, and information design.
In the second semester, students build on that foundation to investigate concepts of mapping, interface, motion, interactivity, and user experience — building a functional dynamic information system. The work spans the whole interactive development process: research and analysis, user personas, information architecture, design concepts, and a working prototype. The semester project is an interactive guide to a neighborhood of the student's choosing in Boston, structured much like a major interactive project you'd find in a design studio.
Two threads
Five courses, four institutions, two threads — systems thinking and multimodal perception. The two threads are not separable: a designer who can read a system can read perception, because perception is a system.
Contact
Open to faculty appointments, workshop series, and curriculum-development engagements. For research depth on the cross-modal thread that runs through the multimodal teaching, see Research →.