Week 8 - Jigsaw on design philosophies

Two reminders: (1) the assignment for next week (see below) and (2) a reminder to bring 3 copies of your "concept idea" for peer feedback and discussion. The goal of the concept paper is to get you formulating your ideas and get feedback early on how to focus your ideas or what you can do to develop your idea. It can be text, a picture, an outline - whatever gets your idea across so you can get useful feedback.

Next week we are doing a jigsaw activity - this is a collaborative learning technique in which you first (1) work in one small group to learn about X, (2) then in a second group, teach others about what you learned about X, and then (3) in this second group discuss the intersection or relationships among the various ideas. For us, the X's are: sustainable design, participatory design, and human-centered design. Each of these represent a particular philosophy of design - and therefore each illustrates how a set of ideas can guide a set of design practices. Next week we'll go to Samara to see Frank Lloyd Wright's "philosophy in action".

We assigned these on Wednesday (Andrew we put you in the human-centered group - I think). You only read the 2 papers for your group (not all 6-yikes) and the 1 short paper by Sanders.

In your first group - discuss - and be prepared to teach others:

• What is X (sustainable, participatory, human-centered design)?
• How does this idea influence design activity (the designer, the design, the process)?
• How does this idea fit within the concept maps we did last week? Or more broadly how does it fit in your world?

Also - the sustainable design group is "missing" a paper - I'll send it out on email to all.

Week 7 - Oct 7 Thought Questions

This week we are approaching the conclusion of our exploration into different ways of "unpacking" design (process, social process, philosophy, way of knowing, etc.). We started this way so that when we explore cognitive perspectives we have a language for describing different kinds of thinking, knowing, and learning.

The Rowland paper is a synthesis and application of Nelson & Stolterman's book "The Design Way" to articulate an epistemology (theory of knowledge) of design. How does he characterize a theory of design knowledge? How might this be broadly applicable (other design fields such as architecture, mechanical design, construction engineering, etc.)?

The other reading is a revisit of Dorst from the third week of class. In some ways we started here to open the space and we are ending here to map out the space of design knowledge. What would go on your "map"? How might some of these ideas be connected (think of a mind map)? Which of these ideas are central to your philosophy of design?