Designing Lifestyles: From Insight to Impact

How do designers engage with real-world contexts to understand people’s needs and wishes? How can design processes shape culturally and aesthetically resonant design solutions? And how do design teams collaborate effectively to transform insights into impact?

This course invites both designers and non-designers to engage in a hands-on, context-driven approach to design. You will investigate how social and cultural dynamics can inform design practice, using the concept of 'lifestyle' to frame your investigation.

Through a series of semi-structured exercises, you will analyse the preferences, values, attitudes, and behaviours of a chosen user group, as well as the environments they interact with, and translate your findings into the design of a product, intervention, or product-service combination connected to the lived experiences of its users.

You will also explore form-giving and prototyping as essential tools for shaping interventions that reflect an intended aesthetic vision and clearly communicate design intent.

Given design’s multidisciplinary and integrative nature, you will work in diverse teams, collaborating across backgrounds and disciplines. Each team will be led by an experienced Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) student. This offers IDE students an opportunity to develop leadership and teamwork skills, while helping non-design students to find their way in the field of social and cultural design.

Summative assessment in this course is based on group work and consists of one assignment:

Assignment 1 – Group project (100% of the grade).

Students will be guided through the assignment with a series of semi-structured exercises.

Assessment will be based on two deliverables:

-A group process report
-A final group exhibition, including a materialized design.

The report should include reflections on individual contributions to the group work.
In principle, the final grade should reflect cohesive group effort, aligning with real-world practice. However, in extreme cases, individual grade adjustments may be considered.

A formative feedback session with coaches and peers will take place approximately halfway through the course, using the course rubric as the basis for assessment.