Systems Design Thinking (formerly Integrated Design)

In large organizations or companies, the ongoing tracking of trends and events within their internal and external environment can mean success, both today and in the future. The art of tracking these trends and events is called Environmental scanning. This class will provide students with tools on how to examine trends and important events, and how to understand the key environmental indicators—internal, external, qualitative, and quantitative that can have an important potential impact on their work.

Data visualization is an emerging field requiring technical skill, design aptitude, information translation, and interdisciplinary thought. This course will introduce the fundamental concepts, methods, and practices of data visualization design to visually display the results of student research, analysis and creating powerful tools for brainstorming.

Graduate Seminar

Graduate Seminar aims to enable students to undertake rich and robust creative exploration that is informed by contextual and critical inquiry. Graduate Seminar serves to advance both the critical inquiry and critical writing skills of students, and enable the cross-referencing of theory to practice. Social, political, economic and environmental themes will be used to inform weekly classes.

Trends in the 21st century have paved the way for a participatory approach to design. The goal of this class is for students to understand human-centered and participatory methods tools and techniques – conducting observational research, interviews and workshops, undertaking internal and external research activities, generating conceptual frameworks, formulating insights, throughout a participatory design process.

The success of any project - a new product design, or the redesign of existing products - for an external client, or for an internal project, is to adopt a user-first approach that positions the people that use what we design front and center. This class will expose students to how designers should learn about, from, and with their users or customers, and will equip them with the research tools needed to design great user experiences.

In this hands-on lab course designed to build skills in advanced data visualization, students will work to build technical skills in R, one of the leading analytical programs used today. In addition to building customized data visualizations, students will learn methods for data transformation and processing necessary to effectively communicate data through images.

Professional Practice I

Part A provides a cross-disciplinary overview of the arts and creative industries and their importance to GDP and the economy overall, i.e. the creative economy. Students will strengthen their understanding of the broader business of creativity and arena of culture in which they will operate professionally.
Part B allows students to make a plan to address gaps in their resume, prepare their portfolios, and refine their oral presentation.

The design projects assigned in Design Graduate Studios share a similar structure, but differ in their complexity. Topics will be relevant to today's and future challenges.

Studio III often focuses on Experience Design. Experience design is about alleviating people’s problems and bringing them joy through products, services, and systems that should improve the quality of life, and create efficiencies that did not previously exist. Students will learn how to orchestrate a complex series of interactions, including the emotional and physical responses that these interactions generate.

The course is designed to offer students a hands-on understanding of business strategy. Students will explore the process of strategy formation and implementation, and gain experience analyzing the effectiveness of both individual strategic initiatives and the organization as a whole. Students will develop a pragmatic understanding of what is required to advance a concept or design through the strategic process in the business environment.

The design projects assigned in Design Graduate Studios share a similar structure but differ in their complexity. Topics will be relevant to todays and future challenges.

Studio IV often focuses on Social innovation Design. Social innovation challenge traditional ways of doing things and introduce new, different and more sustainable behavior looking for the best equilibrium between effectiveness and social value.

Entrepreneurs and designers alike need to have a good understanding of the business landscape within which contemporary design-driven groups and corporations are inextricably embedded. The class explores issues, theories, cultures, and methods associated with the goal of designing an “ideal business”. The aim is to develop a business design strategy and a plan, both imaginative and reliable, to initiate new ventures, through means of design methodology, sensitivity and culture, for business.