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.

The study goals of this course will be assessed in two ways:

• Assessment 1 is a group assignment with the aim of producing a ‘Design Guide’ for your future design practice. You will complete this assignment over the six theme weeks of the course. The objective is to come up with 25 insights about design process and practice during the course. These insights can come from anywhere, but the group discussion is aimed at capturing your insights as you go through the course. Each week you will select and discuss some popular material relating to Design Processes and Practices and the particular theme that week. This could be a film or video, a podcast, a blogpost, a reading, or something similar. Towards the end of the course you will produce your design process guide, following a simple format.

• Assessment 2 is an individual examination completed over a period of up to 3 hours in week 10 of the course. Questions will test your understanding of the academic readings associated with each weekly theme.

The final grade is pass/fail constituted by the two summative assessments. Both assessments must be passed to pass the course.