A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Black and white headshot of Hector Silva, an adult person with a medium-fair skin tone.

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Hector Silva

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

I have over ten years of teaching experience at acclaimed industrial design programs, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Notre Dame, Rochester Institute of Technology, Academy of Art University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My dedication to design education was recognized when I was named Young Educator of the Year by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). I also work as an industrial design consultant, running my own studio, H Design. My passion for promoting design education led me to establish Advanced Design, a nonprofit organization. This initiative earned me the Special Achievement Award from IDSA.

More recently, I have launched Offsite, an innovative online design school. Offsite is my experimental venture to bridge the gap between academia and industry, aiming to revamp the traditional methods of design education.If you're interested in disrupting design education, creating amazing objects, feel free to get in touch.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Sketching is one of a designer's most crucial skills, integral to both generating focused ideas and presenting them across commercial, responsible, and experimental design. This course develops students' freehand sketching to communicate a design's form and function.
An introductory course in Designed Objects, it welcomes students of all levels and has no prerequisites.

Each skill is taught in class and refined in one-on-one sessions. Students practice thumbnail sketching, shading, and form development, building from lines, ellipses, and cubes into more complex forms. Methods include 'Form, Divide, Beautify' and concept pages. The course also covers orthographic projection for precise technical drawings, two-point perspective for objects in space, and digital sketching on the iPad.

Students focus on objects and how they are made, working through a progression of design problems, from form families to multi-part exploded assemblies and objects in use. They study how materials such as soft goods, glass, concrete, and wood read on the page and are introduced to design-for-manufacture concepts. The course also includes a visiting designer who shares their approach and a field trip to an industrial design studio.

Class Number

1274

Credits

3

Description

Sketching is one of a designer's most crucial skills, integral to both generating focused ideas and presenting them across commercial, responsible, and experimental design. This course develops students' freehand sketching to communicate a design's form and function.
An introductory course in Designed Objects, it welcomes students of all levels and has no prerequisites.

Each skill is taught in class and refined in one-on-one sessions. Students practice thumbnail sketching, shading, and form development, building from lines, ellipses, and cubes into more complex forms. Methods include 'Form, Divide, Beautify' and concept pages. The course also covers orthographic projection for precise technical drawings, two-point perspective for objects in space, and digital sketching on the iPad.

Students focus on objects and how they are made, working through a progression of design problems, from form families to multi-part exploded assemblies and objects in use. They study how materials such as soft goods, glass, concrete, and wood read on the page and are introduced to design-for-manufacture concepts. The course also includes a visiting designer who shares their approach and a field trip to an industrial design studio.

Class Number

1462

Credits

3