Dear friends,

This is a counter-proposal for a communication design thesis course.

This course initiates a year-long investigation that positions design as a form of knowledge production rather than problem-solving. Students develop self-authored projects that may resist immediate categorization, maintaining sustained speculation rather than settling into consensus or stereotype.

Building on prior coursework, students propose design investigations—not solutions—that operate in the realm of hypothesis, contradiction, and productive uncertainty. Projects should generate new questions about how visual communication shapes culture, politics, and social relations, embracing what the curator/architect/industrial designer Emilio Ambasz terms "counter-design" practices that challenge existing frameworks rather than fulfilling predetermined briefs.

These investigations must manifest through the material conditions of graphic design itself. There is no design without form, no concept without its physical and digital embodiment in paper, ink, pixels, code, space, and time. Typography carries meaning through weight, spacing, and scale; color operates as both symbol and sensation; materials speak before content is read. Students work directly with the stuff of communication—understanding that paper stock, printing processes, screen resolutions, and coding languages are not neutral vessels but active participants in meaning-making. The investigation occurs through form, not despite it. Ideas emerge from sustained engagement with graphic design's material vocabulary, where conceptual speculation becomes inseparable from formal experimentation across print, digital, spatial, and temporal media.

Umberto Eco's concept of the "open work," articulated in Opera Aperta (1962), describes artworks that deliberately embrace ambiguity, multiplicity, and active audience participation in meaning-making. Unlike traditional works that guide viewers toward predetermined interpretations, open works function as "fields of possibilities" that invite diverse readings and collaborative completion. Eco distinguished between works that are open by accident (through poor communication) and those that are intentionally structured to accommodate multiple interpretations while maintaining internal coherence. The open work doesn't abandon authorial intention but rather creates what Eco called "controlled freedom"—a framework within which audiences can actively participate in generating meaning. For thesis, open work suggests that the search for appropriate form becomes inseparable from the creation of new knowledge. In this approach, form doesn't illustrate ideas—it discovers them. 

Investigation as Process

The semester emphasizes process over product, research over resolution. Students engage in generating new connections, unexpected directions, and forms of knowledge that don't yet exist. Projects should resist the efficiency of information systems that seek to quickly categorize and consume creative work.

Rather than moving linearly toward predetermined outcomes, students work within four modes of resistance to immediate understanding:

Overabundance: Projects that generate meaning through excess, multiple sources, and assumed identities

Strategic withholding: Investigations that provide enough information to engage but resist closing the loop to ensure continued engagement

Dispersed networks: the work is designed to transform through circulation, embracing mistranslation and social interference

Intimate scale: Projects requiring sustained attention and active participation rather than passive consumption

Studio Structure as Laboratory

Weeks 1-3: Speculation
Students identify areas of sustained curiosity—not problems to solve but territories to investigate. What aspects of visual culture, technology, or social relations demand deeper questioning? What established assumptions deserve challenge?

Weeks 4-7: Hypothesis formation
Development of investigative approaches across media, testing ways of generating rather than consuming knowledge. 

Weeks 8-11: Productive interference
Sustained investigation allowing projects to be questioned by issues of power, politics, capital, desire, and technology. Guest critics serve not as validators but as additional interference patterns.

Weeks 12-15: Sustained opening
Rather than conclusion, projects reach a state of informed speculation. Final presentations demonstrate not what students have solved but what new territories they have opened for continued investigation.

Goals

By semester's end, students will have developed capacity for:

— Speculative thinking: Operating comfortably in uncertainty and contradiction

— Knowledge production: Contributing original research that expands rather than confirms existing understanding

— Critical resistance: Creating work that challenges and/or extends, rather than serves, existing systems

— Active engagement: Inviting engagement rather than accommodating passive consumption

Assessment 

Process (60%): Evidence in terms of research, organization and form making in support of genuine investigation, intellectual risk-taking, and resistance to premature closure

Engagement (40%): Contributing to collective knowledge production through generous critique and collaborative thinking

Students are evaluated not on successful problem-solving but on their ability to sustain productive inquiry, generate new questions, and create work that demands active engagement from others.

This intensive investigation prepares students not as service providers but as cultural agents capable of using design to generate knowledge that doesn't yet exist, engaging with institutions, brands, or other parties through sustained creative inquiry rather than aesthetic problem-solving.