How do you build a design curriculum?

You ever wonder what are the building blocks of a design curriculum. What goes into building a curriculum? Why doesn’t it look like the way you want it to be? Why is it so limited? What are the influences that impact a design curriculum? Let’s take a look at my work in doing design curriculum at SCAD and let other design educators chime in with responses.

The building blocks of an undergraduate curriculum:

1. General Education — These are the courses that any student of any program around the world should have regardless of what topic they are studying. The 3 R’s so to speak + maybe some specific general education (or shared education) courses that fit specific program.
2. Design & Art Foundation — These are courses that anyone trying to externalize visual, physical, and otherwise sensory material need to know from painting to architecture. Course specific foundations for digital can be added in this list, or otherwise be part of the “the major” (see below).
3. Art & Design History — Kinda speaks for itself
4. The Major:

• Core theory classes — Theory classes can be studio classes, but some while having a studio component also have strong lecture and reading requirements which reduce the amount of project-studio time.
• Topical studio classes — Experiential practice areas, where making and criticism are combined into a learning opportunity.
• Senior studio classes — Is a space for the senior student to take everything they have learned thus far and develop into something real, something to be critiqued, something major for a portfolio.
• Sponsored Studios — This is a sub-type of studio course. Usually can be substituted for topic studios if the school organizes things efficiently for students. This is where an outside organization sponsors the course. This serves many purposes: realism, recruiting opps, etc.

5. Electives — Courses that supplement the major through cross-topic exposure.

6. The Minor (optional) — An added year’s worth of course material usually in a topic the student feels is related enough to add value; or they just have general interest in the topic out of curiosity (or lack of decision making skills).

Let’s see how all this pans out.

So your job is to fill in the courses for all the topics and studios that are otherwise unlabeled and take over the electives if you don’t want to encourage exploration outside the major.*

*You are financially incentivized to keep more students in your department, school, college, etc.

Here’s a suggestion for Interaction Design:

• Design topic 1: Human Factors
• Design topic 2: HCI
• Design topic 3: Information Architecture
• Design studio 1: Digital Product Design
• Design studio 2: UI Design
• Design studio 3: Service Design/Systems Design

Now, you can take up the electives as noted before. AND you can break up senior studio into specific courses as well. But these decisions have other ramifications.

Now, of course there are so many assumptions here:

1. We have to work within some sort of school-wide structure.
   This is true only in environments with shared courses like foundations and general education and especially true when you don’t really have cohorts due to rolling admissions. Things need to be syncable against a common core schedule. This also means that courses themselves have to map against similar timing structures, so that the lecture course for Art History is the same length as the studio for Digital Product Design. In the case of SCAD all courses fit into 2.5hr class schedules with some exceptional studios taking it to 5hr. There are other exceptions that are so out of the box that they are not worth going into except that they were just darn fun! (see appendix)
2. There is probably some sort of prerequisite system for courses. I.e. I probably needed to take Psych before Human Factors and Anthropology before research methods.
3. Students have to front load on foundations, but they can spread out gen ed courses. This way they can balance workloads. You don’t want to be caught with a single quarter/semester with all studios. We called that a death sentence.
4. You want to add a course that is similar to existing courses in a different department (or even school) and while there are differences in goals and outcomes, the overlap is close enough that the “owners” of the other program can keep your program from being approved. However, they won’t compromise on their program and worse they are incentivized to not allow your students in their classes because it means their students will be competing for open spots and thus unable to complete their curriculum, or just delayed.

There are a host of other problems and your problems will change depending on how your school operates more than anything else.

In the end, you can see how fitting EVERYTHING into a full school program in 4 years is just near impossible. I think it is near impossible to make a program that is as strong on social science and humanities as it is on engineering. We need to strike a balance, or we need to make getting a minor something that students are expected to do instead of something they do just because they are attracted to it. For example. at SCAD minors aren’t even added to a degree transcript or diploma. So the student puts in all this work and they don’t get any acknowledgement for it other than to say, I did this.

I’d love to see how other people are making their undergraduate programs. I have explored other formats and curriculum ideas, but in the end the forcing functions of the school environment pushed me into this format.