I’m a designer and researcher working predominantly with ceramics, an Associate Professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently an artist-in-residence at the Harvard Ceramics studio.
As a designer and researcher, I use hands-on making methods and modes of work from various mediums and disciplines, and the work often evloves hand-in-hand with new possibilities for production of objects.

Serial Production is a means of material and cultural creation that is repeatedly duplicated, seeping into daily life and collective experience. The rise of digital production tools has been opening up possibilities for what the serially made object could be. These relatively new technologies are exciting to me, as they inspire the development of original object languages, free of known traditions, archetypical forms or endlessly paraphrased references.

Being an industrial designer that works in ceramics, I have moved over time to incorporate craft methodologies in which I am, as the maker, involved in every stage of the process, reacting and making decisions along the way. Objects are an archive of the accumulated processes and marks by which they are made. Software, printmaking, 3d printing, extrusion, slip casting are all participants, leaving their marks in the final product. My work therefore involves both the object and the processes by which it is designed and produced; Creating things which archive unique workflows intended to challenge and maximize the forms and languages they produce.

The studio is located at

Harvard Ceramics
74 Mt. Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA 02138  



Get in touch at jhopp@risd.edu