Courses

Core Courses

GS/MDES 5101 3.0 - Design Theory and Criticism
This seminar provides an overview of key theories and themes that form the foundation of contemporary critical design studies. Drawing on theories from a broad range of disciplines, it employs close readings of selected texts and works to explore design as a product, a practice, and a mode of social communication. Specific topics may vary with the instructor.


GS/MDES 5108 3.0 - Design Studio 1
This studio course offers students opportunities to explore problems in graphic design, visual communication, information and interaction design. By emphasizing critical inquiry as a primary means for learning we will be setting the groundwork for the graduate thesis. Through making, reflection, collaboration, and critique, we will explore the underlying principles synthesizing theory and practice as necessary partners in design. We will look at the designer's role in the process of revealing and making meaning-as a mediator, and as an author, producer, integrating content and form across projects as visual expressions of the individual thesis investigation.

Prerequisite: Registration in the Graduate Program in Design or permission from the Graduate Program Director.

GS/MDES 5109 3.0 - Design Studio 2
This course expands upon the advanced concepts introduced in Design Studio 1 GS/MDES 5108 (3.0) and offers students the opportunity to pursue issues with greater depth with an emphasis on more independently motivated exploration. Students work with a faculty member, producing design work with full supporting process documentation. Projects may be individual and/or collaborative. Students work with a faculty member, producing design work with full supporting process documentation. Projects may be individual and/or collaborative. Students, faculty and invited guests may attend critiques and student presentations. Spaces are open to qualified students not registered in Design.

Prerequisite: GS/MDES 5108 (3.0) or permission from the Graduate Program Director.

GS/MDES 5102 3.0 - Design Issues
This course examines contextual issues for communication design. Topics include technological innovation, social change, cultural values and behaviour, and business models. The course employs lectures, presentations and extensive readings.


GS/MDES 5104 3.0 - Design Research Methods
This course introduces students to a range of methodologies and strategies used to conduct research in graphic design. Students will be exposed to the relationship that exists between research as a practice-based activity and research as scholarly inquiry and will have the opportunity to engage in the research process through studio work, papers and presentations.


GS/MDES 5006 0.0 - Design Colloquium
All MDes students in both years of study come together on a regularly scheduled basis to: review and present their work, plan and give presentations on special topics and listen to guest lectures.


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Thesis

GS/MDES 5002 18.0 - Thesis
The thesis studio project demonstrates mastery of design knowledge and process and is fully documented in a report, presenting the research, analysis, rationale, evaluation and other supporting material. Students pursue their thesis topic with a supervisory committee.

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Elective Courses

GS/MDES 5402 3.0 - Type in Motion
Explores the storytelling abilities of motion design for broadcast and cinema using the temporal and sequential aspects of typography, image and sound. Work is created using both analog and digital methods, and is deliberately focused on using experimental techniques and graphic means to make graphic communication.

Integrated with undergraduate course FA/YSDN 4002 3.0

GS/MDES 5403 3.0 - Interactive Systems Design
An advanced investigation into systems-intuitive and learned-that support human activities via interactive communication and distribution networks. An understanding of these communication/distribution methods working in reciprocal fashion from users to the computer and back, is presented.

Integrated with undergraduate course FA/YSDN 4003 3.0.

GS/MDES 5405 3.0 - Book Design
Offers an advanced level practicum course that explores the structuring of bound, print-oriented, long text information documents. The history, anatomy, and structural dynamics of the book are examined and the contemporary private and commercial press/publishing process of the printed book is investigated.

Integrated with undergraduate course FA/YSDN 4005 3.0.

GS/MDES 5407 3.0 - Corporate Identity Design
Focuses on the design of a corporate identity system for an organization. The system will involve the design of graphic identifiers, typography, selected applications and supporting documents.

Integrated with undergraduate course FA/YSDN 4007 3.0.

GS/MDES 5408 3.0 - Information Design 4
Explores the affordances of both print and digital media for the application of information design principles and methodologies introduced and developed in earlier courses. This course will take an intra-disciplinary (print, interactivity, time based, environmental) approach to researching and developing a comprehensive presentation of a site to be determined by each section.

Integrated with undergraduate course YSDN 4008 3.0.

GS/MDES 5412 3.0 - Design Management
Examines the theories and practice of design management in contemporary organizations. Through case studies and presentations by visiting speakers, students learn to construct practical working models of management systems. Projects require students to demonstrate investigative, analytical, organizational and business-oriented communication skills.

Integrated with undergraduate course FA/YSDN 4102 3.0.

GS/MDES 5601 3.0 - Performing Arts and the City
This course examines the impact of the performing arts on local communities.

Same as Communication & Culture 6112 3.0.

GS/MDES 5602 3.0 - Globalization of Communication and Culture
This course focuses on the role and significance of the rapid growth of multinational communication industries in shaping the modern world, with particular emphasis on the relationship between technology and the structures of power and control. Global communication systems, the global economy, and global crises are examined from a critical perspective.

Same as Communication & Culture 6303 3.0

GS/MDES 5603 3.0 - Race and Gender in Digital Technology
In recent years corporate leaders, government officials, and media pundits have portrayed the western restructured socioeconomic near-future as a 'digital' one, forefronting the centrality of digital technology and the digitization of information to the social, economic, and political changes currently sweeping Canada, as well as the rest of the OECD. In this course, we will examine the ways in which race and gender manifest in the discourses, policy decisions and representations of digital technology in Canada.

Same as Film 5320H 3.0, Women's Studies 6903 3.0, Communication & Culture 6511 3.0.

GS/MDES 5604 3.0 - Communication & the Socio-Technical: Perspectives, Debates, Applications
This reading and seminar course investigates some of the texts in the burgeoning study of society and technology that have inspired its major philosophical perspectives and frameworks of research. Sociocultural inquiry into new communication and information technologies frequently invokes one or another perspective grounded (selectively) in these texts; this course instead focuses on systematic comparison of the several distinct perspectives that characterize this area of study, with particular attention to their deployment in communication and culture research.

Same as Communication & Culture 6523 3.0.

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