Design
The Design Core encompasses Contextual Design Research, Interaction Design and Team-Based Collaborative Learning. All three areas of study share a logically rigorous creative/iterative process formulated to address human wants and needs, seen and unseen. This process proceeds from discovery to definition, synthesis to concept, iteration to refinement and making, and finally, to communication and reflection. Core studies capitalize on CCS strengths in the technology-intensive digital arena: great facilities, excellent equipment and technology, and an infrastructure for working with industry on projects that challenge students and provide real value for sponsors. Through research and studio projects, students will advance their knowledge and application of emerging technologies and trends in the areas of interdisciplinary design and transportation design.
Contextual Design Research
The ongoing evolution of research tools and methods presents a variety of challenges and opportunities for designers. At CCS, the design research curriculum provides an overview of both traditional and emerging research tools and methods, with a focus on the most useful and relevant applications of each approach. CCS students will develop the means to understand and evaluate competing methodologies and to make informed decisions about when and how to apply each method. The design research landscape encompasses research-led and designled perspectives. The research-led perspective covers a range of approaches based on applied behavioral science, such as focus groups, product clinics and surveys; as well as those based on observational and interactive principles, including field ethnography, lead-user innovation and usability testing. Students will gain hands-on experience developing research protocols, designing questionnaires, conducting interviews and observing user interactions. CCS graduates will acquire in-depth knowledge of research processes that will enable them to conduct and evaluate design research in their professional roles.
The CCS graduate program insists on the essential connection between research and design. Our curriculum for design-led research pursues the latest approaches in visual and generative design thinking to make this connection seamless. The design-led research perspective takes students beyond problem solving to help them identify future design possibilities and new business opportunities. Students trained in design research at CCS will have research-oriented strategic business skills that poise them for design leadership.
Interaction Design
The ubiquity of technology-based products and tools has changed the design landscape. Designing products and services for interaction requires a sophisticated understanding of people’s cognitive processes and emotions. The quality of experience of designed artifacts is dependent on a complex choreography of resources created to support interaction. Our goal is to give designers the in-depth knowledge of interaction they need to retain their roles as shapers of our world, rather than mere stylists of technological artifacts.
Interaction Design classes will include small, fast-paced projects around different types of interaction, from person to person, to person to machine, to machine to machine. Students will draw on research methodologies learned in research classes and leverage these skills and techniques in their design process to develop project solutions. Students will learn to move from design concept through prototyping toward implementation. CCS graduates will have the requisite skills and knowledge not only to design the physical wrapping for interactive objects, but to create the structures and systems for experiences that people value.
Design Studios in Interaction Design are based on a structured process that leads students from identifying and framing the territory of experience, to conducting research and translating results into opportunities for experience, to embodying the opportunities—with people and in products, processes and environments—in design concepts. It guides them through developing the design by balancing business, technical, and human demands in an optimal solution, to understanding the challenges of implementation. Finally it provides tools for learning from experience and proposing changes to the process in the future.
Team-Based Collaborative Learning
Graduate-level industry-sponsored projects will challenge students to high levels of innovation in research and design, while immersing them in the processes and structures of the business world. Projects may address practical problems or be purely theoretical in purpose and pursuit, i.e., serve a research function for sponsors. Partnering with marketing, business, development and engineering team members from sponsoring companies, students will gain first-hand knowledge of the dynamics of interdisciplinary teams, and will learn how to build them and work effectively within them. They will hone communication as well as creative skills as they address the real demands of a given project and respond to feedback from the team and sponsor. The opportunity for MBA students from our partner business schools to participate in sponsored projects will enhance the experience of working in interdisciplinary teams and better prepare graduates in both design and business for their roles in industry.Culture
The CCS graduate program places the study of design within a broader cultural context, and guides students to a deeper understanding of that context through the humanistic disciplines. CCS is unique in requiring the study of liberal arts at the graduate level. Humanistic studies within the MFA graduate programs help students develop a deep contextual understanding of design, historically and in our moment in time. We believe that is central to training design professionals for effective participation in increasingly interdisciplinary global working environments. In classes taught by liberal arts faculty, students will explore the social, economic, political, and historic contexts of design. They will be introduced to the formalized study of the language of visual culture and the effective interpretation and use of signs and symbols as cultural referents. All liberal arts courses will have embedded in them a set of universal employability skills and attitudes: logic and argumentation, composition and rhetoric, ethics, teamwork, communication, and intellectual curiosity. Students will learn theory and also work on problems that show how those framework are immediately applicable. The goal is to prepare graduates to think critically and apply theoretical frameworks to practical situations.