The Designing Utopia course at Bard Graduate Center offers students insights into modern and contemporary design through seminars, site visits and research.

School: Bard Graduate Center
Course: Designing Utopia
Location: New York City, USA
Course dates: July 2024
Application deadline: 15 April 2024

Bard Graduate Center's intensive two-week summer program in material culture studies is open to college students and recent graduates.

This summer, students in professor Freyja Hartzell's course Designing Utopia will look at the history of modern and contemporary design in North America and Europe, from the nineteenth century through today, as a series of utopian projects.

They will examine 19th-century British design reform as a response to the Industrial Revolution, 20th-century German design as a nationalist impulse, and Soviet design in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution.

Also included in the course is the Oneida community's attempt to blend religious fervor with free love and furniture design, the feminist push for clothing and interior design reforms, design interventions for maternity and childhood such as toy and doll design, communes and 1960s counterculture, design for disability and access, speculative design and Afrofuturism.

Morning seminars will be followed by site visits to New York City collections. A final research project will utilize Bard Graduate Center's study collection and provide students with the opportunity to experience first-hand the delights and challenges of designing a utopia.

Students who participate in this course will be eligible for three upper-level undergraduate credits.

Applications to this course have now closed.

Top image: Bard Graduate Center students and faculty members examine objects together during a symposium at BGC, photo by Fresco Arts Team.

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