Design Thinking and Making

Description

The course aims to establish proficiency with fundamental strategies that designers use during the process of designing to solve problems and/or create innovations. It is based around the idea that design makes ideas tangible so that they can be understood and evaluated before commuting them to reality. Upon the completion of this course, the student is able to: •              Understand the process of designing as a combination of analytical and synthetic processes that lead to explorative experiments in order to solve salient, sometimes contradictory and confounding, aspects of wicked problems. •              Use a design thinking process to generate and test user-driven innovation, including the gathering of inspiration, the generation of ideas, the rapid prototyping of these ideas in tangible forms, their critical evaluation and their persuasive communication to the outside world. •              Use the constructive process of hands-on, material creation as a method of critical inquiry alongside that of linguistic-oriented methods. •              Use basic analogue and digital design methods and tools, including rapid prototyping and digital fabrication. •              Follow a design thinking process to creatively approach a self-initiated problem statement that is relevant to a contemporary cultural or social context.