Wednesday, September 17, 2008

What are your ideas for Design as X project

October 22 you will turn in and discuss in class what you found through your own exploration of an area of design knowledge (e.g., design for emotion, sustainability, lifecycle; design as innovation, mathematical thinking. analogical reasoning, design fixation, etc.).

To focus your exploration and find 3 quality sources to review - you need to start thinking about this now. Using the comment box below - send me some ideas on what you are thinking so I can provide some guidance on where to look.

To get you thinking - here are some links to design communities.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I think I would like to do design as communication.

Aidsa said...

I would like to explore design as innovation.

Robin said...

Aidsa,

Here are some thoughts on Design as Innovation:

Marian Petre wrote up a nice study on "disciplines of innovation" in design for Design Studies - I have more details (it's around 2003 or so) but I know you can get it off the Purdue e-libraries. This is a study that focuses on professionals.

You could get creative and explore the "innovation" literature - there's lots. I think it would be interesting to see how they characterize it and how this might provide a new insight as compared to how researchers might talk about it. One example is Christensen's work on Disruptive Innovation. Another example is checking out Joe Sinfield's Entrepreneurial Engineering course he's teaching this Fall.

In terms of focusing on students - Ann McKenna and Mica Hutchinson (aka Green) have been looking at undergraduate students from an adaptive expertise framework. This would focus on students (whereas Petre focuses on professionals and Christensen focuses on innovation concepts).

Robin said...

CJ - I already gave you a bunch of thoughts - let me know if they don't pan out for you. :)

celia said...

I would like to do "user-center-design", which connects with what I learnt from cognitive engineering:)

Robin said...

Celia - good topic.

You might want to chat with Carla Zoltowski (cbz@purdue.edu) - she recently explored this topic and found some good stuff. Monica of course is a good source as well :)

Of the places you could go with this - how do designers think about users, how do they get informaiton about users and how does it make it into their design, and how do people follow user-centered design principles, etc.