UIC Master of Design (MDes) in Industrial Design
The UIC MDes is a two-year professional degree program focused on an independent masters research project that offers students the opportunity to explore a topic of inquiry with the potential to inform and shape disciplinary knowledge. Graduate courses are designed to guide students through thesis development and to augment this process through the introduction of topics and projects related to design theory and practice.
Felicia Ferrone served as Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) in Industrial Design from Spring of 2015 through August 2022, overseeing curricular development, recruitment, and instruction for the ID MDes program. In the role of DGS Ferrone led the development of an ID MDes mission statement and the detailed development of individual courses that had been established concurrently to the formation of the UIC School of Design, established 2013. The current ID MDes program, implemented in the Fall of 2018, provides a framework of interconnectivity between research courses (DES 501, DES 502, DES 531, DES 532) and studio courses (DES 500, DES 550, DES 551) over the four semesters. This framework strengthened formal design development opportunities and brought more structured guidance to thesis development.
In addition to leading overall revisions to the ID MDes program, Ferrone co-developed course materials and instructional techniques for several of individual courses: DES 531 ID Master Project Research I (4hrs), DE532 ID Masters Project Research II (4hrs), and DES550 ID Masters Project Studio (12 hrs).
Graduate Course Development
DES 520 Chair, Table, Wood, Door, Wall
Chair, Table, Wood, Door, Wall is a multidisciplinary graduate seminar co-created and co-taught by Felicia Ferrone (Design) and Ania Jaworska (Architecture). The course is a selective offering to advanced students in the Graphic Design (MDes), Industrial Design (MDes), and Architecture (MArch) programs. It represents the first offering of a joint course between the UIC School of Architecture and the UIC School of Design.
The course explores nuanced relationships between designed objects, furniture, and architecture through disciplinary intersections. The subject posits that objects and spaces are not a given but constructed and that designed objects and spaces are a product of social, economic, and cultural conditions. The surfaces and forms addressed—doors, windows, walls, beds, tables, or chairs—provide a framework for interactions and behaviors. A series of 3-dimensional exercises guide students through iterative work that fosters understanding of everyday environments and creates new possibilities for living and interaction. In addition to understanding the semiotics of object and space, we deconstructed and recomposed space as a social dimension explored across disciplinary boundaries.
DES 550 Thesis Studio: Year 2
The UIC MDes Year 2 Thesis Studio provides supervised independent work that builds from prior research activities. Emphasis is ideation, prototype iteration, formal/technical development, model fabrication, and user evaluation. The purpose of the course is for students to fully develop and execute a masters thesis project from an engaging and appropriate project statement developed in Thesis Research I.
Michael Maclean, Explorations in Wonder, 2022
A major component of Industrial design is the manipulation of form as a means of communication or to induce a specific emotion. The project is about taking the opportunity to explore emotion through surface, light, and color, and about working with those elements at different scales. The outcomes are not predisposed and offer insights from which to build. The goal is to provide opportunity to explore, interact with and appreciate color and form.
Shinkyung Do, Future Epidemic: VR Decompression Sickness, 2022
The project seeks to establish protocols and guidelines for users to safely migrate a return from virtual reality (VR) to physical reality. Inspired by a scuba diving ascending manual, the project directs VR users to engage in several de-immersion stops that offer activities to stimulate their senses. Activity stimuli are based on grounding techniques used in the treatment of Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DPDR), a mental health condition that involves feeling distant or detached from oneself. The proposed title, VR Decompression Sickness, affords VR users a name for the sensation of return reality and the guided transition experience supports successful reorientation to actual time and space.
Noah Wangerin, Equichron, 2022
Design integrates parts into whole compositions. Time should be part of this whole. By considering what exists and what is needed, integrating the dimension of time in design results in intent beyond the moment of interaction; design that is new by necessity, that builds on the past, and that can adapt to the future. Historically, bicycles integrate time well. Established standards lead to a modular system of frames and parts enabling incremental upgrades with an ability to mix technologies as old as 100 years. This value is challenged by the electric bicycle market, booming as a result of technology, the pandemic, rising oil prices, and automobile shortages. Electric bicycles ignore the values of the past, specifically in accessibility and resiliency. Producers can integrate a battery into a frame towards wholeness of form, but this neither builds on past frames nor facilitates future maintenance from local bike shops; time is not integrated in the decision. With the right system the bike in your garage could replace a car and still be maintained by your local bike shop, while growing and adapting with you.
Lafayette Doty, The Black Race, 2021
We don’t all start from the same beginnings and this can affect one’s ability to enter a physical activity. The stereotype that “Black people can't swim” is deadly. Studies have shown that African American children are drowning at a rate 5.5 times more than the average white child. By exposing the immoral barriers that the African American community has and is currently facing, The Black Race will unmask viscerally why "Black people can't swim." The combination of film, architecture, and industrial design was used to push how we digest design and information. Using the long-established Olympics games as a platform, The Black Race dives further to expose inequalities through discursive objects and events.
Soorin Chung, Little Forest , 2022
Addressing a higher education context, the project asks how we might design a supportive therapeutic space that promotes a sense of well-being within accessible areas on campus for students who are waitlisted for counseling. Little Forest is a supportive service that helps students reduce anxiety and stress when a counseling session is unavailable. Inspired by the Scandinavian and Japanese concepts of rejuvenation through nature (e.g., forest bathing), this comforting and safe space is designed to passively and actively engage students in their own self-care.
Varun Kamat, Louder than Words, 2019
By allowing users to interact with the mechanics of graduated accumulation, ecosystem interdependency, and moral escapism, the series of objects presented in The Moral Blindspot allow the user to interact with and contemplate essential versions of the more complex and inescapable moral dilemmas we face as producers and consumers in the designed world.
Raina Kumar, Through Objects, 2017
The project investigated opportunities for understanding and acceptance of others through social reciprocal interaction. A study of the intrinsic potential of designed objects to engender communication results in five new furniture typologies. Each object (chair or bench) explores a different idea of conversation, power, understanding, intimacy, or privacy with the intent to enhance and facilitate varying social experiences.
Tongxin Guo, The Library, 2017
The project dealt with various human personalities, the different ways individuals approach social interactivities, and how the design of everyday objects influence and define the subtleties of interpersonal relationships. After investigating many rounds of objects sharing this theme, the final object designed was a public bookshelf that aesthetically displays the cover of books while gently creating curiosity and inviting involvement in the area surrounding books.
Jake Vail, Presences of Our Past, 2017
The project was the development of a device which deals with the ever-growing collection of personally generated digital content in the home. By condensing a mass quantity of photos horizontally, individual representation of memory is visualized. Accessing the content of the collection is possible by zooming into any point in the compressed images or by altering the assortment on the screen, creating different visual narratives to be displayed within the home.
Zackary Filbert, Poetry and the Designed Moment, 2015
Connecting Indonesian culture with visual explorations of haiku poetry, led to the development of open-ended tactile objects designed to facilitate squatting. The final low concrete furniture forms call out the aesthetic qualities of ordinary experiences by highlighting the stillness in everyday life.