WKSP 101 — The Workshop

The Workshop · 2 units · Semester 1 · Required core — every semester, everyone

Overview

The Workshop is the bottega — the room where everything else in the curriculum becomes real. Every semester, every student, on a project team that ships. Semester 1 is your first build: small, finished, and yours, because da Vinci didn’t start with the Last Supper and you don’t start with a capstone.

Materials rotate through the region’s craft traditions — surfboard and skateboard construction, amplifier and pedal electronics, camera rigs, drones and ocean sensors — but the first semester’s law is simpler: make anything, and finish it. Finishing is the skill. Critique is the method. The year ends with your work in a public exhibition, which is not a metaphor: people you don’t know will look at the thing you made.

One day a week on the page, about ten minutes a sitting — and then your hands take over.

The Two Registers

• Catalog register: Project-based fabrication and design practicum — tool skills, materials, iterative making, documentation, exhibition. First course of the eight-semester Workshop sequence (WKSP 101–402).
• Teaching frame: The bottega — a project team that ships. Make anything; finish it; show it in public.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you can:

1. Scope a project you can actually finish in a semester, and finish it. → Judgment · Craft
2. Use basic fabrication tools and materials safely and competently. → Craft
3. Take critique, iterate, and show the difference between draft and final. → Judgment
4. Document a build so someone else could follow it — photos, notes, decisions. → Articulation
5. Exhibit finished work in public and talk about it. → Articulation

Each outcome maps to the five institutional outcomes (Judgment, Command of Intelligence, Craft, Articulation, Breadth of Mind) — the assessment spine of the degree and its accreditation evidence file.

The Made Thing

The build itself — finished, documented, and shown at the year-end public exhibition alongside every other first-year’s work.

How You’re Assessed

• The build — scoped, finished, and functional. Finishing is graded.
• The documentation — a build log someone else could learn from.
• Portfolio review and public exhibition — the Workshop is assessed the way working studios are: by the work, shown.

The Daily Path

One session per course day — each one built to look easy and pull you in: one thing to experience, one idea, one question to carry. The schedule below is generated from the course’s own day files.

Day 01 — Make Anything

Ten minutes — and for once, only two of them are reading. This is the Workshop. It starts with your hands.

Begin Day 01 →

Day 02 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 2. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 03 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 3. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 04 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 4. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 05 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 5. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 06 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 6. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 07 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 7. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 08 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 8. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 09 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 9. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 10 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 10. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 11 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 11. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 12 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 12. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 13 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 13. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 14 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 14. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Day 15 — coming soon

Being written — publishes with Week 15. All five courses advance together, week by week.

Every course here is built to one standard: it ends in a made thing you can show, and it ships day by day.