Alexander
Cheek
Assistant Professor in the Practice of Design, Carnegie Mellon University
Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer, Macromicro LLC
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15289-1070
arwcheek [at] gmail.com
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I teach courses in design thinking and methods to students in the Tepper School of Business and College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2009 I took a position in the Middle East, teaching at Carnegie Mellon University Qatar. Currently I am based in Cambridge, MA where I am commercializing a research project.
As a transdisciplinary designer and researcher I study the broad reach of design and how it can affect communication, human interaction, organizational change, and society at large. I believe that design innovation comes from a rhetorical foundation and the unique disposition and perspective that designers bring to situations, making them particularly great agents of change.
My professional work involves tools and data visualizations for decision-making within complex corporate environments. My research in this area and the subsequent software tools are currently being developed as Macromicro. Ongoing authorship is in design theory.
Undergraduate study in information and graphic design at the RIT School of Design; Masters of Design from Carnegie Mellon University School of Design and Department of English. CV and portfolio with teaching, research, service, and professional practice available upon request.
Courses for 2012-13
51-385 Designing for Service
99-405 Design for Organizational Change
51-261 Communication Design for I.S.
Past Offerings
51-171 Design and the Human Experience
51-254 Design for People & Planet
51-267 Industrial Design for Non-Majors
51-302 Information Design
67-315 Interaction Design and Technology
Teaching Principles
• With design as the undercurrent of nearly all disciplines, teaching design should foster
an attitude of interdisciplinary thinking and action.
• The designer has an ability to address the most complex, wicked problems that we face
in the century ahead. For students of design, breadth and diversity of study is needed so that the work they do is more informed, intelligent, and capable of bringing about meaningful change.
• A plurality of design is that in addition to being fundamentally interdisciplinary,
the disciplines of design are what bring us such concrete examples that adorn daily life.
• The academy should continue teaching the formal aspects of craft and detail so that future designers are not just facilitators but still highly-skilled makers.
• The holistic nature of design includes the need to promote environmental sensitivity
and systems thinking in students of design.
• Ethics and the human-centeredness of design should always be made explicit in
the classroom.
Areas of Interest
The "Four Orders of Design"
Design as a Liberal and Applied Art
The Disposition of Designers
Rhetoric's First Canon of Invention
Wicked Problems
"Human-Centeredness"
Design and Technology
Systems Theory
The Lineage of Design