Brown-RISD Master of Arts in Design Engineering

John Caserta is a graphic designer with experience in web technologies, design education, information design and local politics. He has been on the faculty at RISD since 2006 and in academic leadership as head of the Graphic Design department and, since 2022, as dean of the division of Architecture & Design. The division houses 68 full-time faculty, 25 staff and 1,000 students within seven design departments and 15 undergraduate and graduate programs. In addition to running operations for the division, he worked with the deans council to implement a reduction in the undergraduate credit requirement and full-time faculty teaching load, reimagine learning spaces and create cross-departmental exhibitions and studios.

John’s teaching activates physical and digital networks, giving students a chance to “peer out” into the profession and for outside communities to “peer in.” Previous courses—Call for Proposals, The Web & Democracy, Design & Politics, Web Programming, HTML Output and the Design Studio track—engaged students in elements of contemporary practice through making projects together. Projects with students have included: a social-distance drone typeface, printed city postcards, hand-coded minisites, open-source web-to-print software that outputs websites to books, a website to crowdsource flag designs and an essay against design contests.

John received a BA in visual journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill and spent the first decade of his career creating information graphics, multimedia stories and live data visualizations for The Chicago Tribune, National Geographic, The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, the NCAA, NBCOlympics and more. John completed an MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University’s School of Art, which was followed by a Fulbright Fellowship working with residents of a 500-person Italian village to create a mixed-media time capsule to be unsealed in 2030.

In 2007 he founded The Design Office, a co-working space for designers. The Office fostered interdisciplinary exhibitions, books and web projects that engaged arts, education and political sectors. It supported local designers until its closing in 2021 by providing tools, a working library, an event space and a dynamic sense of community. The Office produced web software for designers such as Modern Pictograms, Flatfile, Charette, Contact Sheet and Variable Arrows.

John has written and spoken about design and design education for the AIGA, Design & Culture, Design Observer and Eye on Design and has consulted with various universities, including performing program reviews of graphic design programs at FIT, CCA, Drexel and Lebanese American University. In 2024 he scripted a NASAD-accredited BFA program in graphic design for Qatar University. He remains active in design education and continues to take on commissioned design work.