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Our guest, Dr. Stephen Neely facilitating a ‘Eurhythmics for Designers’ session for MDes students and PhD researchers from CMU’s School of Design in the Fall of 2021

Course Syllabus & Schedule Fall 2021

CMU Seminar III Advanced Interaction & Service Design Concepts + PhD Seminar Design Theory & Practice, Fall 2021

Welcome to the course, which goes by various names. If you are an MDes student, this is 51–825 Seminar III, Advanced Interaction & Service Design Concepts — part of the last set of compulsory classes in your MDes. If you are a first-year PhD student, this is 51–903, Design Theory & Practice Seminar. You will have slightly different assignments and expectations depending on whether you are MDes or PhD, but we hope that by working together as a class, we will all benefit from a wider range of experiences and insights.

Course Goals

  • For MDes students, build on what you have learned in Seminars I and II and throughout your MDes so far, to give you more depth on some topics, and new perspectives on others.
  • For PhD students, build on your prior knowledge and experience, to provide a foundation for your doctoral studies which covers both historical and contemporary issues in design and design research
  • For everyone, to engage in critical discourses in design and explore and reflect about the implications of designing in the world, the agency of designed artifacts and their effects not only in human systems but also in environmental ones.

Course Objectives

  • Introduce you to — and give you an informed, rounded and reflective stance on — theory, models, themes, in design research and practice, which will give you strategic strength and confidence in your professional practice or in further academic contexts.
  • Give you an appreciation of the characteristics of your power, as designers — its scope to influence the ways people live, but also the constraints of the sociotechnical systems within which you work — and the wisdom to deal with this responsibly.
  • Support your work on your MDes thesis project, or the initial phases of your PhD, through giving you a set of theories and approaches which you can use practically to structure and communicate your thinking and research.
  • Build up your confidence and ability in communicating and explaining your process: what you have done, and why, justified through reference to theory and research (your own, and others). This can be an issue for designers, but our aim is that you will be better equipped to do this in both professional and academic contexts.

Course structure

We will explore three main areas and their ramifications:

  • [Un]Making (Week 2–4). This module inquires about the political, social, and ecological implications of design as a transformational practice in our worlds. We talk about emergent ways of designing and conceiving design in the design discourse, including both making and unmaking practices. We question dominant forms of design with a particular focus on the visual and expose students to embodied and somaesthetic forms of enacting and designing for interactions.
  • Intelligence and Dumbness (Week 5–7)
  • Research x Design (Week 7–13)

About the materials (readings, videos, etc): Direct links to materials in our Drive folder or web pages with specific readings for each topic are provided below in the schedule section. The aim is that you look ahead to the next week and do the readings prior to each session, i.e. you should do the readings for Week 2 before the class in Week 2.

Note there are one or two additional readings/videos per week assigned to PhDs, labeled PhDs only. PhD researchers will be in charge of providing an overview of those materials for the entire class at the beginning or end of each session. Also, we will give you access to readings from past years if you want to further explore a particular topic.

Expected Schedule

Week 1 — Aug 31: Introductions and Welcome to Seminar III [facilitated by Marysol]
No readings, be ready to do a brief introduction of yourselves and talk about your research topic (1–2 min per person, no slides)

Module 1: [Un]Making

Week 2 — Sept 7: The Politics of Making [facilitated by Marysol]

Week 3 — Sept 14: Knowing, Sensing, Participating and Designing Otherwise [facilitated by Marysol + Dina]

Week 4 — Sept 21: [UN]Making-Co-creation [Guest + Dina + Marysol]

Module 2: Mundane Intelligence

Week 5 — Sept 28: What is Technology? What is intelligence? [facilitated by Dina]

In preparation to your Weekly Assignment for Week 5, please bring to class: What is the most mundane but intelligent thing that you have ever done or seen? Visualize it.

Week 6 — Oct 5: AI + Society [Guest + Dina]

Week 7 — Oct 12: Spaces for possibility [Guest + Dina]

Module 3: Research x Design

Week 8 — Oct 19: Research x Design [Guest + Dina + Marysol]

Week 9 — Oct 26: Pitching Your Research Plan

  • All: No readings, work on pilot study plan. Each person presents their research plan for a peer review session during class.

Week 10 — Nov 2: Research through Design + Temporality [Guest + Dina]

Week 11 — Nov 9: PhD-led Session

Week 12 — Nov 16: Futurity [facilitated by Marysol]

Week 13 — Nov 23: Megamind-map

  • We will sort and connect the materials of the entire semester and as a group create a mind map of the readings, videos, and discussions.
  • PhDs only: PhDs present their map of the landscape of Design Research

Week 14 — Nov 30: Participatory event

  • All: Students organize and host an end-of-course event with external participants.
Cmu Design Seminar
Design Theory
Design Practice
Interaction Design
Service Design

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Marysol Ortega
CMU MDes Seminar 3 Advanced Interaction & Service Design Concepts + PhD Seminar Design Theory & Practice

Written by Marysol Ortega

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PhD candidate in Design // Carnegie Mellon University

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