Design as Cultural Production
Matthew I. Campbell
Mechanical Engineering
Design practice is necessarily a cross-disciplinary enterprise, and it is our plan within the Design as Cultural Production course to link the roles of engineers, graphic and industrial designers seamlessly. We also anticipate developing relationships with faculty across campus who can aid us in addressing a broad range of subjects related to the development of a product, for instance: cultural anthropology, rhetoric, psychology, ethics business, law, linguistics, marketing and advertising.
There has been a paradigm shift within industry over the past 15 years, which has only recently begun to affect curriculum in design and engineering departments. In the late 1980’s several ground-breaking firms, IDEO, Philips and Frog Design, began to collapse their concept design, engineering and marketing teams into one larger team that worked on all aspects of the design, from conceptual sketches through to launch. We believe that this method of working is a cost-effective means of developing innovative new ideas and seeing them through to fruition, usually preventing the costly redesigns caused by separate teams failing to communicate successfully. This holistic approach to design often encompasses a wealth of important topics that the engineering designer, or the concept designer might independently overlook.
We feel that this mode of operation will be common practice in the coming years, so it is imperative that our students be well prepared for such work environments, making Design as Cultural Production both a desirable and necessary addition to both the Engineering and Design Division curricula.
Objectives
The project-centered course will arm students with the abilities:
- to communicate clearly within an interdisciplinary design team,
- to negotiate solutions for a common opportunity,
- to defend their proposed product within the current social, economic, and technological climate, and
- to learn design and prototyping methods used in other relevant design fields.