COURSE SUMMARY:
By studying and practicing with tools, techniques and methods, design professionals improve their capacity to analyze, order and systematize projects. This enhances both the experience of making and results, and affects anything from programming projects to more intangible periods of intuition and creativity. Design research and methods can be developed alone or in groups, involving simplicity as well as high degrees of complexity. Designers work on multiple registers.
In this class we begin by reflecting on method in creative-functional practice. Design thinking enables us to analyze the phases and aspects of a project, interpreted and often visually represented in many ways. Then the course explores ways to analyze project briefings, order projects sequentially via Gantt and other charts and systematize data in groups. For research, the course introduces common techniques to assist understanding, such as cognitive mapping and analysis of user needs. This leads to a consideration of ethnographic research including conducting surveys and interviews, contextualized as situated design practice, where the practitioner is in close contact and dialogue with citizens, users and consumers.
The methodology of the designer-as-mediator will be examined. The question of research ethics is considered. This course also deals with creativity and explores the question of outliers, deviance and extreme exceptionality, which creative practices often ignore.
- Teacher: Jeffrey Swartz