Class Overview: This class introduces fundamental design principles and practices, such as seeing, sketching, storytelling, prototyping and performing, as a way to demystify design as a discipline. Taught by a diverse group of faculty and guest presenters, students will take a deep dive into design through lectures, labs, and weekly project assignments. A technique-based class intended for students without a design background, this class aims to enable more effective collaboration with designers and the ability to apply the foundations of design to any discipline.
Class structure: The class is organized in weekly sessions each structured around a core design topic. Each week the course staff will offer a specialized lecture on the weekly topic, which will be followed by a discussion and a review of students’ projects from the previous week. Talks by external presenters and guests from various industry sectors will complement the lectures in order to provide different perspectives and insights on design processes and methods. The exposure to industry combined with theoretical and practical experience offer a holistic approach to design.
Each week will be complemented by a lab session offering technical knowledge on design tools and methods as well as hands-on training in the shop to familiarize students with all the equipment needed to develop design projects. The architecture shop is equipped with some of the most advanced tools needed for design, from 3D printing to milling to robotic fabrication tools and more, and will be available to all registered students.
Students will be working on a semester-long project that will gradually develop through the weekly assignments, exemplifying 12 critical design principles. Student projects will both address the weekly topics as well as a broader context/theme for design: Light. Light is addressed here as a tool for perception, as a design product and as a medium that we interact with in many everyday contexts. This is not limited to any type of product (desk light, chandelier, floor lamp etc) -- rather we are more interested in investigating the way that people use light and developing new creative products and systems of light.
Why learn How to Design (almost) Anything: Design traditionally operates within specific disciplinary boundaries: we are either part of the architecture discipline, or graphic design, or product design, or web design or even design within mechanical engineering or systems design. However, we rarely seek overlaps between these different design disciplines. This course aims to give students an explicit and fundamental introduction to design in order to more effectively utilize and collaborate through the lens of design. Taking a cross-disciplinary design approach we aim to incorporate new design tools, methods and technologies that encompass all of the design streams to provide a solid design foundation for future designers that wish to incorporate design thinking and doing in their practice.
Class History: How to Design (almost) Anything is product of the widely successful How to Make (almost) Anything class, taught by Neil Gershenfeld. A topic of discussion and debate for many years was the possibility of embedding more design instruction into the course. In the Fall of 2015, we initiated weekly design critiques and delivered a recitation with the title "How to Design (almost) Anything" as an experimental approach to addressing this. We realized through trial and error that trying to shoehorn Design into HTMaA was unlikely to be an ideal format given that HTMaA is a crash-course into Making and has little room for a thorough or substantial design process. At a final Design recitation in the Fall of 2015, Neil joined us for a lively discussion as to the possibilities of a course called "How to Design (almost) Anything," after which we pursued the development of this course to focused exclusively on a crash-course for Design. The question is: Now that you know how to make, how do you design what you can make?