Start your UW experience inside the studios and woodshop of the UW School of Art, Art History, and Design.

Designers today face a challenge: The way our society sources materials, manufactures objects, and uses products results in the continued degradation of the ecosystem around us. Most eco-sensitive product design is focused on reducing this harm, ideally to zero. This simplistic ideal misses the opportunity to use the effort of the global manufacturing system to rebuild and reinforce our ecosystems, rather than simply leaving them unbothered.

This class explores the question: What would it looks like to design objects such that their creation made the ecosystems around us healthier and more vibrant. We will focus our material explorations on foraged and found natural resources originating from the farm, market, and a wide-variety of wild and domesticated landscapes.

We will make prototype products -- furniture, clothing, domestic objects, tools, etc -- and imagine how the production of these objects can fit within vibrant community spaces and ecosystemic relational entanglements. And we will learn to tell the stories of these new kinds of object-systems.

No prior museum or art experience is required. This course is open only to transfer students and is designed to help you begin your UW journey feeling confident, connected, and creatively engaged.

Learn more about the instructor of this course:

Teaching Professor Dominic Muren, Design, UW School of Art + Art History + Design