While searching for a graduate program and scheduling meetings with professors, I was offered some great resources. In my pursuit to understand what the general structure of my design courses would look like, a professor from NYU gave me the link to their full course. This site included the syllabus, readings, assignments, final projects, and ample resources.
The best part? This course is worth $7,000 and I got it for free, so I wanted to assign myself a summer challenge and see how long I can work on this course as if I was a student there. Here is the course description below:
Ideation & Prototyping: The creative process will be investigated in order to generate ideas for art, design, technology, and business endeavors. The course will show how ideation, design research & thinking, and prototyping can inspire, inform, and bring depth to what one ultimately creates. Students will expand their arsenal of design research skills, learn how to think critically about their audience, content, form, and processes, as well as, understand the importance of utilizing more than one research and design strategy.
To format this webpage accessibly, a table on contents will link to each week of the course. Under each section, there will be a bolded sub-header with assigned coursework, reflection questions, and readings with my input directly below it. For larger projects, I will link to a separate webpage that will be gradually built upon.
Week 1
Why am I taking this course?
As I prepare to attend the Master of Design program at UC Berkeley in the fall, I am trying to best prepare myself and my creative process. After studying mathematics for the past 6 years, I realize my education has been constrained by theorems since I was a legal adult. Ironically, I toiled away in my free time, claiming I was taking back my power by studying exactly what I wanted once the math was complete. I need to remold my mindset beyond a rigid set of rules. I am getting used to tinkering again, at messing up and trying again, at building a measly prototype that could eventually evolve into something presentable.
What do I think I’ll get out of this course?
I am hoping to find resources beyond what would be presented to me from a basic Google search. I want to spend my free time reading about different methods of design, exploring creative works from artists, and building my portfolio.
What do I want to get out of this course?
As with all of my projects, I want to produce tangible projects scaffolded from my education and interdisciplinary passions.
Watch: Finished Not Perfect by Jake Parker
This video largely aligns with the ideologies of many emerging design programs, that being: perfectionism isn’t in reach, you just need to start. A lot of the projects I have pursued began with overwhelm as I already tried to imagine the final product, but that is impossible without at least a skeleton outline to start.
Read: Module 1
Five Phases of Ideation & Prototyping
- Discovery/Inspiration: intersecting the 5 senses with objects in environment
- Utilize a sketchbook or notebook, it should be accessible and low-fidelity
- Research/Ideation/Brainstorming: various forms of researching (physical, cultural, user, conversation, education)
- Journal using the convergent thinking method, writing rapid idea lists, drafting a mind map or concept map for an “exhaustive overview”
- Design/Sketching/Mapping: beginning tangible representation of ideas (visualization, sketching, concept mapping)
- Visuals are valid form of communication alongside audio/text-based information
- Prototyping: building concepts through a cycle of rough prototypes, iteration, and editing
- Sketching out multiple versions of an idea can lead to open conversations on improvement
- Positioning/Pitching: framing the idea, telling a story, communicating to the audience
The Goal of a Process Website
Considering that I have built on my portfolio website since community college, I respect that the curriculum of this course identities the value of documenting one’s creative process. Some values include:
- Reviewing and Reflection: allows for backtracking and understanding key points in the iterative process
- Saving Ideas for Future Projects: ideas left unexplored in previously documented projects can be the motivation for new creative works
- Recapturing: if an idea doesn’t work, the process can be repeated with a new direction
- Sharing Your Process: utilizing an array of materials as a means of communication with an audience and expressing evolution of ideas
Time Management and Productivity Rules
This section mainly included optional readings from various productivity/self-help authors. I’m going to list off some books that have really helped me with my workflow.
- Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy: The main takeaway from this book was to overcome the most challenging task of the day first (I learned this early on while getting my Bachelor’s in Math). This requires listing out your highest priority tasks for the day, determining the order of urgency, and if lower-level tasks can be rescheduled.
- 12 Week Year by Brian Moran: In order to accomplish lofty goals, it is better to treat them on a seasonal instead of annual basis — hence, the 12 week year. I created a list of 3 broad goals I wanted to accomplish in that timespan, then had to list 3-4 measurable action items per goal that could be completed each week. Brian Moran also asks readers to acknowledge where they might fall short and to prepare accountability measures to maintain progress. I keep track of my 12 Week Year in an excel sheet.
- Self-Directed Learning by Malcolm Knowles: The author is an adult education specialist who guides readers in building a “Learner’s Contract”. The book includes a few dozen resources for producing engaging, tangible projects for adult learners. My contract is organized in an excel sheet and defines my objectives and strategies for improving my learning style for graduate school, as well as how to scaffold my portfolio through my education.
- Note: I studied andragogy (the study of adult education) for undergraduate research. Here is a general handout on beneficial classroom environments for adult learners. This largely contributed to my advocacy for myself and peers in college classrooms, assuring that our education is relevant to our extrinsic goals and real-world applications.
Read: The Miseducation of the Doodle by Sunni Brown & Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool by Mike Rohde
There is a spectrum of how detailed a doodle can get, from low-fidelity shapes to complex concept maps. It seems that while some audiences feel they are “not artistic enough” to draft out their ideas informally, the reality is that doodles are a low-stakes vehicle to express ideas.
Sunni provided some great professional applications for doodles through collaboration with peers. Drafting out company values, agreeing on employee workflows, determining solutions, and committing to future goals are all creative solutions to overcome design challenges as a group.
Mike also had some great points to make, mainly about dissolving the ego to explore ideas tucked away within us. Although there is an excess of software to choose from in building our projects, he recommends that we take just 15 minutes to sketch out a variety of ideas before putting too much time into deliverables. There is an opportunity for exploration and commentary on paper, as compared to a polished prototype that took weeks to be presentable.
Assignments for Week 1
- Process Website (linked HERE)
- With the goal being to document my creative process, the website allows for reflection, archival, and iteration. Through documenting my work, this provides a roadmap to my audience in understanding the evolution of an idea.
- Constant Input or Constant Output
- I have to choose between keeping a Discovery Log (input) or building a Passion Project (output). Daily/weekly/monthly updates will be posted to my process website.
- The winner is: Constant Output! I have been exploring tools within the Apple suite for my data visualization projects and this will be a great way to share my process with others.
- Personal Inventories
- Share a photo of 3 personal items that reveal something about myself.
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: I read this book as a senior in high school and Rand’s writing style changed my perspective of the “rules” to be followed in publishing. The sentence structure in that book is inspiring!
- My cats: The black one, Luna, loves the outdoors and keeping me on my toes. The white one, Naomi, is my childhood cat going on 12 years now. They are my happy place. 🙂
- MacBook Air 2015: This laptop made it through all six years of my undergraduate degree, and although it cannot withstand the design programs I work with now, I keep it at my bedside to journal every night.
- Share a photo of 3 personal items that reveal something about myself.
- Input Map
- Sketch a concept map of all the inputs from various environments in my life.
Week 2
Read: Module 2
| SCAMPER | Jame’s Webb Young Technique | Kirby Ferguson’s Technique |
|---|---|---|
| Substitute Combine Adapt Modify Put To Another Use Eliminate Rearrange or Reverse | 1. Gather raw materials 2. Digesting the material 3. Unconscious processing 4. The a-ha moment 5. Idea meets reality | 1. Create boundaries 2. Consume everything 3. Digest the research 4. Drop it |
| these acronyms align with guiding questions that can help to produce new ideas, taking variables within a creative problem and asking what can be removed/amplified/re-organized | browse your resources, assessing every angle of possibility, take the time to rest after ideation, act on moments of inspiration, make the idea align with tangible reality | to avoid overwhelm, don’t make the problem too broad or narrow, stay focused, then research all resources possible, reflect on contrasting and supportive evidence, take time away for ideation |