Whiteness

Good Design is a new undergraduate course that exposes students to a range of design issues through an intensive and interdisciplinary seminar that includes reading, writing, and making.

This exercise, titled “Whiteness,” asks each student to allow his or her own body and its covering to become a site of investigation. For this short project, each student is asked to select a plain white t-shirt and transform it to exemplify a particular design principle, so that the shirt remains legible while also demonstrating the design principle.

At the same time, students probe the cultural constructs surrounding “whiteness” through discussions and response papers incorporating readings, film clips, media images, and music. Students wear their shirts as part of the final presentation and also show digital images of their work, allowing for a robust discussion of the distance between the “thing itself” and its representation.