84610 Inside Design

Description

Designed products play an important role in everyday activities. Products facilitate ways of doing things and make these activities pleasurable through form and function. In this way, they encourage users to incorporate habits and practices into our lives and shape our identity, our possibilities, and our preferences. Product design both serves and shapes everyday patterns of life that have consequences for our ongoing sense of fulfilment, our health, and our impact on wider societal and environmental systems. Designers need to develop not only expertise in their craft, techniques and methods but also an insight into the ways that designed products shape human experience through the applied design thinking process.

The subject introduces students to the current directions, methods and techniques used in product design practice through a series of bi-weekly, theory-oriented lectures with lead industry experts. This is followed by weekly studio/workshop sessions that allow students hands-on application of the knowledge gained during the lectures. In this subject, students learn about the different approaches to design that is central to their product design journey. Students learn to critically examine and evaluate the design of everyday objects and develop an understanding of what good design encompasses and how to apply this to an everyday object. The subject shapes the student’s design philosophy while placing an emphasis on functionality as well as aesthetics to create emotionally engaging products, elevating their understanding of what goes on inside design.