Dear Tamara Christensen
I have been meaning to respond to your request but other committments
kept me tied down for a while.
I have been teaching a course dealing with Design Methodologies for
close to thirty years now at NID, India and over the years we have moved
a great deal to discover new approaches and have shifted our emphasis
from teaching set methods to providing the students with a sense of
direction as well as the possibility of building their own positions
with reference to the world of design action. This led to the
normanclature of the course itself being changed a number of times over
this period and the various names included Design Methods (after John
Chris Jones) Design Processes, Design methodologies and now it is called
"Design Concepts and Concerns". The course is rooted in current issues
that are being discussed in the media and is at the top of ones mind in
each period in which the course is conducted and the students are asked
to connect with this reality directly from as much field exposure as
possible in our cities in India outside the school. We have found this
very useful in bringing an awareness of the real world nature of design
thought and action and these developments have been documented in a
number of papers and visual presentations that are aviailable on my
personal website at thsi link below:
Design Theory papers
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp/About_Design_Theory/FileSharing83.html>
Further I have started documenting these courses in almost real time
blogging at my education blog called "Design Concepts and Concerns" and
this has been active for the past one year now and can be seen at this
website link below:
"Design Concepts and Concerns"
<http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com/>
This course started with addressing the needs of Undergrad students at
NID and it continues to be offered each year at the end of the common
Foundation Programme before students branch out to all the disciplines
offered. However over the past ten years this course has also been
offered to all our Post Graduate disciplines at a preparatory level and
for the Foundation it is a five week course and the the PG level it is a
two week course, much truncated, since the time available is much
shorter. Both these courses are discussed on the blog and all the
assignments are shown as the courses progress.
The background issues that form the major theme each year is discussed
on another blog that is an advocasy blog called "Design for India". This
year the theme for all the batches at NID is "Food, Inflation and the
Economy" and the students are required to work in teams to address and
discover design opportunities across many disciplines that would help
address the issues and concerns that are identified during the early
stages of investigation. You can see this at the blog links below:
Design for India
<http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
Both these blogs have a list of recommended websites that would inform
the students about the emerging approaches to design thinking across the
world and these are discussed in our class in groups as well as when the
particular opportunity comes up in the course of our explorations. Some
links from the blogs are listed below:
Jerome Diethelm <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~diethelm/>
Design Council, UK <http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/>
Charles Brunette <http://www.idesignthinking.com/main.html>
NextD <http://www.nextd.org/>
Dori: Design Anthropology <http://dori3.typepad.com/my_weblog/>
There are many more and the web is now quite rich with design resources
and this list is growing by the day and we intend to use these as we go
forward. However there are some books that would be a great resource for
our design students.
Harold Nelson and Eric Stolternman, "The Design Way" is a great resource
that we recommend as a must read.
John Thackara, "In the Bubble", is a wonderful and readable resource
that can help set the agenda for design action.
I will be happy to expand on the list of books, websites, thought
leadrers and approaches that we introduce our students to if you so wish
and my own course is documented in my papers on my website. I had made a
presentation of this course at the EAD06 conference in 2005 at Bremen,
Germany and the papers can be downloaded from their website and from my
own website here below:
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp/About_Design_Theory/FileSharing83.html>
The Paper is called "Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in
Education" take a look.
Design for us is changing and we may need to discover new ways of
sharing these changes with our students going forward. I would like to
hear of other efforts in this direction in education and I am sure thtre
are many happening across the world today since design is in flux and we
can use these discussions to map out all the dimensions of the change
that is being discovered out there.
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
from my iMac at home on the NID campus
16 August 2008 at 9.50 pm IST
-----------------------------------------------------------
Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group (DST, Govt. of India) (2006-2008)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India
Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242
email: [log in to unmask]
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------
Tamara Christensen wrote:
> Greetings all!
> I am writing to ask which readings you would recommend for a graduate level
> course in Design Methodologies that includes students from industrial,
> interior, and graphic design.
>
> The professor who has taught the course for 20 years unexpectedly retired
> and I am attempting a course redesign for the upcoming semester (which
> begins in 12 days).Can you kindly send me any ideas for readings?
> I appreciate anything you may offer- canonical, obscure, historic,
> contemporary, provocative, critical, etc...
>
> Warm regards~
> Tamara Christensen
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Doctoral student
> College of Design
> Arizona State University
>
> Director of Conference Travel
> Graduate and Professional Student Association
> Associated Students of Arizona State University
>
> *we teach what we need to learn.
> *
>
>
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