Design Processes and Practices

This is a faculty core course for all IDE MSc students.

Design Processes and Practices focuses on the process of designing, a process that takes you from a thought to a thing. Design processes exist in all sorts of forms and in all sorts of ways. As a developing designer you may have a very concrete idea of what a design process is. It is the aim of this course to help you question that idea, and open up to new ways of thinking about design and designing. Where do design processes take place? What is the value of designing? What makes up a design process? You will get to ask all kinds of questions about designing in this course.

The design process is a social and emergent process through which ideas are developed in collaboration with others to achieve a defined outcome. We may think we can plan such a process, and to some extent we can, but what takes place in reality can be a lot different from what we initially thought, for a number of reasons. In this course we will explore this tension in two questions: what do we think is going to happen? And what actually happened? Being able to balance and learn from these two questions is at the heart of how to develop as a designer.