Art for Children: Beyond the Book
Rhode Island School of Design
Department of Illustration
Spring 2024 • Undergraduate Course
Note: This course is originally taught at RISD by author and illustrator Kelly Murphy. I’m teaching this course during the Spring ‘24 semester with a new syllabus I’ve developed around the same theme.
Through a combination of creative assignments, readings & screenings, this course exposes students to multiple approaches, theories and perspectives (historical, cultural & disciplinary) on understanding and creating for children. The assignments offer a high degree of formal & thematic flexibility, challenging students to adapt their strategies to different scenarios, ranging from toys/products, information/data, contexts of education, entertainment and more.
Group critique sessions
01 • TRANSLATING COMPLEXITY
In this assignment, students each picked from a list of "impossible questions" children ask (Where do babies come from? What are black holes? What does god look like? Why do onions make you cry? etc). They then created something that could answer that question, first for a 5-year-old, and then for a 10-year-old. Their objects ran the gamut from the scientific to the whimsical, adopting various metaphors, imagery and interactive elements to aid children in their sense-making of the world.
02 • MAKE-BELIEVE KITS
The second assignment immersed the students in a more commercial context, challenging them to conceptualize and produce their own make-believe kits. Students were encouraged to design not only every aspect of the play experience, but also consider how the various components would come together as a product to be packaged, marketed and sold. Their kits ranged from pretend bagel shops, space discovery, foraging, fairy wands, flower arrangement and more.
03 • THE ‘BACK-IN-MY-DAY’ CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
We’re witnessing a progressive flattening and collapsing of all our physical objects – button phones, books and newspapers are now flattened into sleek flatscreen devices, gas stoves are replaced by induction cooktops, cash registers have collapsed into scannable QR codes. How would one explain a cash-register to a child in whose reality such an object has never existed? In this assignment, students imagined a future in which such objects were all but extinct, and designed their own museum exhibits to explain these objects and concepts to an audience of 4-10 year olds. The assignment culminated in a makeshift “museum opening” set up in the classroom.
This course is currently running. Check back here for more pictures and updates on upcoming assignments.
03 • THE ‘BACK-IN-MY-DAY’ CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
04 • MAPPING
05 • HOW-TO POSTER CHALLENGE
06 • INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING • Semester Project