Eric Allan Hotchkiss

Core Studio 2 focuses on how material, form, and interaction shape experience over time. Building on the foundations of designing for others, this studio deepens students¿ engagement with making, refinement, and use.
Students work extensively with physical materials, exploring construction, surface, finish, and detail as communicative elements. Here, students deepen their builder practice by working through material constraints, assemblies, and refinement, learning how construction decisions shape experience. Digital tools are more fully integrated into the workflow, with 3D modeling used to develop form, assemblies, and tolerances, and 2D CAD supporting patternmaking, layouts, and fabrication planning. Sketching remains central as a means of refining proportion and communicating intent.
Interaction is introduced as a temporal and physical experience, encompassing affordance, sequence, and feedback. Prototyping emphasizes iteration and refinement, with students moving between digital models and physical builds to test how objects are handled, activated, and interpreted.
This studio reinforces building as a disciplined design practice, where material decisions, craft, and structure communicate meaning as clearly as form or function.

Who this course is for
This studio is for students who have completed Core Studio 1 and are ready to deepen their engagement with materials, construction, and use. It is well suited to students who want to strengthen their ability to design objects that are experienced through touch, handling, and interaction over time.

When to take it
Core Studio 2 is typically taken after Core Studio 1. The studio is designed to run alongside the core skills courses¿Designing Interaction, Sketching, and 3D Modeling¿reinforcing the integration of material exploration, digital workflows, visualization, and prototyping. Students are strongly encouraged to have taken, or to be concurrently enrolled in, a digital modeling core skills course, as 3D modeling is used regularly throughout the studio.

This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specs and runs the AIADO template.

SAIC Design @ Homan Square combines professional practice design experience with community activism. Operating out of SAIC's facility in the Nichols tower at Homan Square, the course engages students in a focused dialogue on social project implementation in Chicago and provides the tools and frameworks to realize those projects. Functioning as a pro bono 'design consultancy' where the residents, small businesses and community groups of North Lawndale act as 'clients', each job is treated as a discrete project involving research, knowledge-sharing and design action. The projects will cover a two-semester cycle, with each semester being offered as an independent class. This course, running in the Spring semester, will emphasize the last three stages of the design thinking process; ideation, prototyping, and testing. course class will focus on proposing and implementing solutions that address the contextual research carried out in the first semester. These solutions will be presented to, and critiqued by, the 'clients' who are the main stakeholders, North Lawndale community leaders, as well as SAIC faculty. Recognizing that making is a research process that reveals new problems, the reflexive activity of proposing, making, presenting and critiquing solutions generates new knowledge as well as physical outcomes. It is this collective 'new intelligence' that is the primary goal of the course.

SAIC Design @ Homan Square combines professional practice design experience with community activism. Operating out of SAIC's facility in the Nichols tower at Homan Square, the course engages students in a focused dialogue on social project implementation in Chicago and provides the tools and frameworks to realize those projects. Functioning as a pro bono 'design consultancy' where the residents, small businesses and community groups of North Lawndale act as 'clients', each job is treated as a discrete project involving research, knowledge-sharing and design action. The projects will cover a two-semester cycle, with each semester being offered as an independent class. This course, running in the Spring semester, will emphasize the last three stages of the design thinking process; ideation, prototyping, and testing. course class will focus on proposing and implementing solutions that address the contextual research carried out in the first semester. These solutions will be presented to, and critiqued by, the 'clients' who are the main stakeholders, North Lawndale community leaders, as well as SAIC faculty. Recognizing that making is a research process that reveals new problems, the reflexive activity of proposing, making, presenting and critiquing solutions generates new knowledge as well as physical outcomes. It is this collective 'new intelligence' that is the primary goal of the course.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

In this two-day a week thesis studio students frame their position and voice as designers by defining, advancing, critically examining and verifying a self-selected thesis project. Students combine studio investigation with primary and secondary research techniques to uncover, test and solidify new design ideas, processes, materials, technologies and behavioral insights. Through seminars and in class workshops this body of investigation is formed into a highly directed thesis proposal. Students are tasked with building relationships with external research partners and mentors to define parameters for decision making and verify the efficacy of their projects. The semester concludes with a peer and faculty review at which students must defend the formulation, investigation and synthesis of their thesis proposals.

Readings and references will be shared individually with students as relevant to their individual thesis topics.

Students will primarily focus on the development of their thesis project. This will be augmented with shorter assignments aimed at fostering the skills needed to successfully complete a year-long, exhibition ready project.

In the final thesis studio, students confirm and materialize their position and voice as designers by completing their self-selected thesis project initiated in DES OB 6150 -- Thesis Studio 1.Through an intensive period of seminar and tutorial discussion, prototyping, presentation and critique, students produce highly developed designed objects, systems, and experiences that critically engage specific areas of design, technology, and culture. Emphasis is given to determining potent vehicles through which the instance of the thesis is tested, exhibited and engages public consciousness. The course culminates in a thesis defense and the presentation of a final thesis project at the SAIC Design Show.


You must be a Master of Design in Designed Objects Student to enroll in this course.