Creative Identity Seminar

Creative Identity Seminar is a reading- and writing-intensive course on authorship, voice, and the designer-as-editor. Across fifteen weeks we trace a long arc — from the anonymous craftsmen of early printing through the named modernist designer, the post-war studio system, the rise of the design author in the nineteen-nineties, and the dispersed, networked, algorithmically mediated identities of the present moment. Each week pairs a primary text with a contemporary artifact: a manifesto with a website, a monograph with a social feed, a polemic with a portfolio. Students write a short response every week and a longer essay at midterm and end of term. Discussion is the engine of the course; attendance and preparation are non-negotiable. We pay particular attention to the way identity is performed across media, the way credit is distributed inside studios, and the way platforms shape what a designer can be seen to be. The seminar does not aim to settle the question of authorship but to give students a working set of frames they can use to think about their own emerging position. The final assignment is a five-thousand-word essay positioning the student's practice within the lineages we have read.