Program Learning Outcomes

Mission Statement

First Year Immersion is designed to rethink the ArtCenter early-term experience to reflect pervasive shifts in design education toward the interdisciplinary, as well as student wellness and retention. With learning outcomes that focus on historical, conceptual, and contextual awareness, the goal is to nurture a holistic practice that will provide the groundwork for rapid development of more specific skills once students enter their major of choice.

Practice Holistic Visual Thinking

• Deploy basic visual design principles in both 2D and 3D.
• Use drawing as a method of representation, notation, mapping, thinking, and planning.
• Integrate conventional and alternative design methods to promote diversity of thinking and ecological approaches to making.
• Visually communicate ideas and concepts across a wide array of media including both analog and digital platforms.

Produce work with Contextual Awareness & Synthesis

• Navigate the culture of images and objects to produce work awareness of social, political and historical contexts.
• Synthesize information from a variety of sources in order to critically apply knowledge to research and projects.
• Articulate conceptual underpinnings and implications of existing designs, environments, films, images and products.
• Combine acquired skills to work in new ways, exploring and experimenting with materials and ideas.

Materialize their Desire to Matriculate into a Specific Degree Program

• Actively engage with the First Year Immersion Studio to recognize how their personal vision and skills mesh with the degree programs offered.
• Create a project that demonstrates design and form language expected in their major of interest.
• Identify the outcomes of different degree programs and their application to a profession, industry or career path.