This course proposed a collaboration between non-design and design students when it was presented by another tutor. However, it was opened for only design students due to some technical problems and I was asked to reframe the course for the students who are in their junior and senior years in the departments of industrial design, architecture, interior design, urban design, and landscape design. I’ve decided to form this elective course in a more attractive and metacognitive way rather than lecturing the theoretical structure of the design process that they have already experienced in their studio courses.
Thus, I set a watchlist including movies, TV shows, and documentaries that tell the story of some non-design professionals who are to apply design thinking in their job. This became a discussion-based course that we discuss the watching material in each course in relation to design thinking and design principles. Thus, the students are encouraged to discover their own design thinking process and correlate the way of thinking with the non-design professions. At the end of the semester, the students deliver visual presentations on a medium they prefer that demonstrate their design thinking perspective through the watching materials.
Besides, the students are due to group work of brainstorming sessions in order to develop solutions and policy-making suggestions for given paradoxical issues like Zero Waste Living, New Media & Media Literacy, Digital Products & Carbon Foot Print, Reliability in Citizen Science, Science Literacy & Ecoliteracy, Simulation & Narratives: Game Scripts, NIMBY: Environmental Conflicts, the Case of Wind Turbines, The Challenges of Interdisciplinary Working Environment. They are encouraged to be inspired by the method and the case studies in the book Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design by Kees Dorst. In this exercise, the students define the root causes of the paradoxical problem and are expected to propose a system, service, and/or policy to prevent/regulate, or reverse the tight spot by documenting their brainstorming sessions in podcast format.
After six semesters of this course, the watchlist, texts, brainstorming topics, and the structure of the course are updated and finalized by the participation and suggestions of students. At this point, we are in the process of preparing a catalog with the voluntary and well-attended participation of the undergrad and grad students who enrolled in this course before. The team will decide on the medium and the design of the catalog that will introduce the course outcomes. Besides the verbal positive feedback of the students about the course, this voluntary action shows their emotional engagement with it.
Since the catalog hasn't been ready yet, I can only provide some links as examples of the course outcomes. However, I would like to add that there are very unique submissions in the formats of video clips, audio files, mobile apps, software, and game design which I cannot give place here.
