The integrative design program allows for a robust and diverse studio and academic experience. Contemporary designers need to learn the skills to become conversant across a range of intellectual, conceptual, aesthetic, speculative, and technical areas. You will acquire knowledge and skills in a wide array of art and design studio practices including typography, digital interface design, print media, video, motion graphics, sound design, and digital imaging. These areas of study will provide you with the opportunity to apply the design process to complex, interdisciplinary art, and design projects. You will utilize the flexibility of our design program to achieve your personal learning goals and explore your particular strengths and interests.
The experiences acquired through the variety of art and design practices will prepare you to confidently and responsively join the ever-evolving contemporary design fields. To this end, the university offers experiential learning opportunities with on and off-campus internships. Interested students maintain a design club active with publications, field trips, and visiting artist events.
- Alfred is unique in that there is only one studio major in the School of Art and Design, and that is the Bachelor of Fine Arts. This represents a very open, multi-disciplinary art and design education.
- Integrative Design has pathways that embrace design thinking across all divisions of the School of Art and Design. From the first-year in Foundations, students are immersed in course work that expands their knowledge, skill, and personal creative voice.
- Course work focuses on critical thinking and the creative and strategic power of the design process to push beyond “what is” and speculate about “what if.”
- Our curriculum focuses on experimental approaches to design. Integrative Design is discursive, nimble, and responsive to technological and cultural evolution.
- Design studio courses focus on expanding your personal, artistic visual language.
- Course work integrates analog and digital media and encourages multiple outputs across print and screen-based media. Projects encourage experimentation with technology, form, concepts, and context across 2D, 3D, web, virtual reality, time-based, augmented reality, projection mapping, programming.
- Students explore many tools, processes, and materials in the Expanded Media Lab. For example, students learn software applications including Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Cinema 4D, Processing, After Effects, and TouchDesigner. Digital and electronic equipment include large format printers, laser engraver/cutter, fabric printer, vinyl cutter, XY plotters, and virtual reality stations.