This course introduces the central themes of design and the design pro-fessions, and the human-centered focus in all aspects of design thinking and practice. We will begin by exploring the nature of having an experience, followed by the broad philosophy of design in relationship to other areas of human activity — the sciences and the arts. We will explore design through its orders of activity: first in communication and second the creation of artifacts. But design has a far greater reach into the intangible and more complex areas of human activity: interaction, processes, systems, and culture. These are its topics of inquiry and, unlike what the patchwork of professions would have you believe, are not fixed by boundaries.
A pluralism that we will discuss throughout the semester is that design is both the intellectual activity and forethought that attempts to create a preferred state, and the act of bringing ideas and change into concrete reality. Design is enormously broad and something everybody participates in as we collectively create the artificial world around us. Many people have greater power in shaping this world — especially those who call themselves designers — and for that reason we will end the course with a discussion in ethics.
Lectures, discussions, and written assignments will be based on extensive readings which will be provided. This course fulfills one requirement for the minor in architecture and the liberal arts requirement. 9 credit hours; no pre-requisites.
Being visually literate today is as important as being verbally literate. Communication design is about finding meaning, communicating information across boundaries, and striking balances between what’s visual and what’s logical. This is achieved through an understanding of basic visual principles, your ability to employ them in your work, your ability to speak clearly about your decisions, and your offering of constructive criticism and ideas both in class and everyday life.
Along with these principles, your growth as a visual communicator relies on a combination of process and exposure. Save all of your notes and sketches to help you through this iterative process. This will be a factor in your final grade for each project. In addition to this brainstorming, there’s an element of serendipity to designing. I believe in those instantaneous ideas, but truly great ones will happen only if you are an informed person about the world around you. Read books, go to the movies, be adventurous, take classes in philosophy and quantum mechanics. The best designers are not aware of their craft alone, but of the relationships among disciplines.
In design, there are no clear pathways or absolute solutions; sometimes there are no answers, but just more questions. Designers deal with this type of ambiguity everyday and are comfortable with it. You too will become comfortable with it, even if you don’t call yourself a designer. The way of thinking we study in this class will be for you to take back and apply to your own field, for design in its broadest sense is a liberal art that shows up just about everywhere and can be applied to just about anything. In this class we will apply design to word and image in an effort to understand how best to communicate ideas and information.
This is a required course for the major in Information Systems. 9 credit hours; no pre-requisites.
Information design is a specialized subset of the already specialized field of communication design. It is concerned with highly utilitarian problems like visualizing data in charts and maps, grouping information and optimizing flow of a document, creating interactive environments that rely on time and theatrics to communicate meaning, and applying conventions for environmental signage for wayfinding or to bring attention to something relevant. “It entails filtering the information, establishing relationships, discerning patterns and representing them in a manner that enables a consumer of that information construct meaningful knowledge.” Always mindful of context, information designers are very pragmatic in nature.
I once heard that if a graphic designer screws up, people will miss the concert, but if an information designer screws up it puts people’s lives at risk. While this is a bit crude, it speaks to the need for information designers in a world where messages are bombarding us more than ever before. Perhaps many of these messages are unimportant, but the thought and craft of design help give the important ones form, clarity, and meaning.
Take what you learn in this class with you to your field and make the world more meaningful and understandable. Aside from craftsmanship, designing information is actually not that specialized at all, for information is the material of the 21st century and we will all participate in shaping it.
Note: this course is listed as “Typography IV” to match the offering in Pittsburgh. This course fulfills one requirement for the minor in architecture. 9 credit hours; pre-requisite: Communication Design Fundamentals.
The service sector of the global economy is enormously significant, and growing more so with declines in commodities and manufacturing. The hospitality industry is the archetype of carefully crafted services, including, for instance, the touchpoints throughout your stay at a Four Seasons Hotel. There are many service providers that can benefit from a design approach: a hospital waiting room, the community newspaper, or airport security. It’s the personal attention you get when you browse a shop’s merchandise, the alacrity with which you can pay your mobile phone bill, and how closely you feel a service met or exceeded your needs and desires. As the designer, you are acting as choreographer of a play which consists of both tangible and intangible components, and services that people will immediately notice and ones that quietly improve the landscape.
For centuries services were simple exchanges between a provider and a customer (a cobbler providing a service to those who need their shoes repaired). Today, the world of commerce is dominated by service providers with complex organizational structures (mobile phone companies with many products, many services, and tens of thousands of employees). These structures can be mired down in bureaucracy, where key decision-makers are so far detached from the customer that they have little idea what real customer needs and experiences are. Customer data and market research is sometimes used to help create or improve services, but this type of information rarely captures valuable customer insight. Design research methods which will be employed in this course bring business a new lens that creates long-lasting and meaningful services and oppose gimmicky marketing and profit-driven decisions from deductive reasoning.
Design’s focus is on people and their interactions across a broad landscape. Using design research methods and abductive reasoning, design moves existing states into preferred ones. You’ll take crisscrossing paths on your way towards this preferred state, having a human-centered focus along the way, and then focus and bring your ideas into concrete reality at the end. Great design can bring clarity to messages, enrich lives, create wholes from desperate parts, and understand that we live and work in a complex and ever-changing system.
This studio course exemplifies what it means to work today. You’ll be in groups where each member will contribute to the efforts of research, idea generation, and realization. Each group will interface directly with a client and I will be there to be a guide and facilitator. 9 credit hours; no pre-requisites.
Objects play such important roles in our lives. Aesthetics, ergonomics, materials, and engineering serve as the basis for how well-designed objects were conceived but it’s not often that we explicitly talk about the life of objects and products before they reach our hands. Industrial Design’s history is rooted in the rise of mass production and flourished through the consumption of the 20th Century. Today find ourselves searching for and implementing new ways of making things that serve the needs of the ecosystem and people alike. But these matters aside, the role of three-dimensional things like chairs, phones, buildings, and kitchen utensils answer to a higher calling than just filling up our world: they support the interaction between people, our environment, and society at large.
Objects also become a part of our personal narrative and serve roles in how we identify ourselves. Most obviously, objects can become symbols of status — a BMW, a leather chair, an attaché case. But objects that are more democratic in nature — an iPhone, an Aeron chair — or ones that are shared by a community, serve a similar role in helping us tell stories about who we are and what we value as a culture. They are a testament to our place and time.
In this mini, we’ll go through a process of research, ideation, and prototyping to bring form to two different types of objects. They won’t become manufactured or machined, but will — I hope — become usable. You will be pushed to explore the boundaries of the projects and are required to develop various concepts for each. Your sketchbook is just as valuable as your final pieces at demonstrating your effort in this class and both process and final product will be equal factors in evaluation. 6 credit hours; no pre-requisites.