A FIRST COURSE ON DESIGN: RATIONALE, OBJECTIVES AND STRUCTURE

1. What is the philosophical/metaphysical stance on design that this course will embody? Why is it important to have a freshman level design course?
2. What are the course objectives? Which skills do we want to teach students in this course?
3. How should the course be structured?

1. the notions of relevancy and agency can be imparted to students,
2. students learn to associate knowledge with application,
3. students learn the broad and integrative skill of synthesis, and
4. thereby strengthen the foundations of scientific and technical knowledge that they will be acquiring in other courses.

With this stance toward design in mind, our position is that this course, and subsequent design courses, should produce students who have the ability to reflect on their design activities and articulate critical decisions; who can solve problems flexibly using the science and technology they have learned; who have a deep appreciation of what other disciplines bring to their problems as well as a deep understanding of their own discipline; and who have strong social skills needed for teamwork. Georgia Tech students currently do not get enough experience doing design, and using design projects to pull together and apply the knowledge they have acquired from the rest of the curriculum. The critical importance of design experiences, which allow students to use and integrate their knowledge, demands that students be exposed to the design activity from the very beginning. Finally, we believe that it is crucial to seed a deep paradigm shift in the minds of incoming freshmen: to have them envision themselves as producers (designers) rather than as consumers in this world. These are the primary motivations behind this course.

We intend that students learn about design and do design in this course. A combination of activities, in particular hands-on design projects, classroom discussions, reflective sessions, and design practitioners deconstructing artifacts or modeling the design process itself, are the means by which this goal will be accomplished. In that process, students will not only acquire design principles and the skill of synthesizing new ideas and artifacts, but also come to realize how what they learn in science, mathematics and other fundamental courses is relevant to solving problems. Furthermore, they will recognize how they can apply that knowledge to affect the world around them through the creation of new artifacts which have an impact on their physical, cultural, and social environment. This hands-on illustration of the association between knowledge and application that a pre-disciplinary design course with cross-disciplinary content can provide should counteract incoming students' (mis)perception that much of what they learn in school has no relevance to the real world. Furthermore, it should motivate them to learn the basics better, and to transfer that knowledge appropriately. These will, in turn, result in stronger foundations.

The remainder of this document contains the knowledge and skill objectives for the course, a set of desired characteristics that course projects should have in order to meet these objectives, and a discussion of some logistic considerations. A draft outline of a syllabus with a matrix illustrating how the syllabus will meet the course objectives is also attached. The skills we have listed seem fundamental to design regardless of disciplinary boundaries. However, it may not be feasible to teach all the listed skills in a first course on design. But it is certainly feasible and desirable to teach in this course, at the very least, the necessity and importance of these skills to design.

Knowledge objectives: learning about design

• The nature of design
• Design in various disciplines
• Phases of design
• Types of design
• Physical/social/cultural/environmental impact of design
• Open issues in design

Skill objectives: learning to design

• Component skills
  • Observation skills
  • Drawing/rendering skills
  • Representation skills
    • Graphical representations
    • Physical modeling
• Analysis & synthesis skills
• Reflection & articulation skills
• Communication skills
• General processes skills
  • Decision making processes
  • Dynamics of group processes
  • Managing different aspects of the design process
  • Researching, gathering, integrating and using information
  • Using theory or paradigms to guide the design process
  • Making design decisions/choices
• Meta-process skills
  • Knowing where to start
  • Selecting design strategies
  • Planning the design process
  • Knowing how to move the process along
  • Knowing when to stop
  • Reflecting on the process
• Design problem solving skills
  • Problem understanding
    • Identifying the problem
    • Formulating the problem
    • Partitioning/decomposing the problem
    • Framing the problem
  • Understanding constraints
    • Identifying available resources and resource constraints
    • Understanding design specifications
    • Identifying requirements, needs, and priorities from multiple perspectives
    • Elaborating design criteria
  • Generating alternative solutions
    • Brainstorming
    • Visualization
    • Other creative ideation techniques
  • Implementing solutions
    • Hard/soft prototyping
  • Evaluation & Redesign
    • Generating evaluation criteria
    • Elaborating evaluation criteria
    • Applying evaluation criteria
    • Incorporating multiple perspectives in evaluation

• Five desired project attributes:
  • require collaboration,
  • involve iterations of problem solving and reflection,
  • doable and authentic problems involving familiar artifacts that do not require a high degree of technical sophistication to design,
  • provide necessary scaffolding and resources, and
  • use of computers/software in the classroom.
• Well bounded projects:
  • in terms of time requirements, complexity and informational and other resource requirements.
• Well scaffolded projects :
  • provide assistance on some aspects so that students can concentrate on those parts that are important for teaching them whatever they need to learn from that project.
• Well specified projects: for each project it should be clear
  • what the task is,
  • what its resource requirements are,
  • what will and will not be provided,
  • how it will be structured, and
  • what the learning objectives are.
• Students should work in groups most of the time.
• Students should create and maintain a record of design decisions, justifications and rationale, keep journals of the design activity.
• In parallel with work on each project, class discussions should be held to encourage reflection.
• Students will be required to write about the projects on a regular basis, articulating what they have learned, the strategies used, what other ones are needed, what knowledge was used, etc.
• Three ways of providing feedback on assignments:
  1. by comparing individual solutions within groups and group solutions across groups;
  2. feedback or evaluation from the teacher or others;
  3. feedback from being able to observe design practitioners in action.
• A good mix projects are required: designing abstract and physical artifacts, projects across disciplines, and projects of evolving complexity - individual design projects (1-2 week), group design projects (3-4 week), and complex design projects (5 -6 week).
• Projects should promote (through reflection and articulation) proper interpretation and indexing, later recall of what was learned, and its transfer and reuse in other situations.