On Teaching Design

One of the things I have been doing lately is teaching more and more. There are two aspects to it. One is the love for teaching, and the other is more of a duty to be a design evangelist and in a way increase the popularity and acceptance of design profession.

Teaching to me is a very difficult thing to do and in a way the most challenging. It is also a world wide notion that the way Design Education is imparted is not up-to mark with the current trends and that it needs to change.

I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to get associated with different avenues to see this dream fulfilled through the different avenues I am associated with.

As I head the operations of the design school, it allows me to get a more holistic point of view on design, in terms of what goes into designing a comprehensive program with proper learning outcomes.

At another design initiative I teach at we look at teaching Design to senior technology Professionals, who are just being introduced to design. This is challenging, since the participants already have a lot of experience.

Talking about design

One of my research areas has been to see how the principles of design can be used in the improvement of quality of education at the primary school level too.

I am excited over these initiatives, and I look forward to writing more about this in the days to come!

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Designing with Intent

What’s your intent

In today’s class we discuss the notion of Designing with Intent. It is a simple concept (well, no concept as such), but serves as a good guiding tool when looking at the design from the human centric approach.

I see this as a corollary from the User Centered Design process and the emphasis on the intent part.

The usage of the word intent of-course makes it appear a bit stronger.

I made the students of my class do this simple exercise of mapping their diploma projects to this intent. The discussions that followed were interesting.

As is the case with a lot of my classes, I often showcase Videos in the class. As designers, getting to listen to these thought leaders is often interesting and gives a point of view that is then discussed. I use these videos to encourage the art of Design Criticism which is something I want all my students to become good at.

For this class we saw the TED video by John Hockenberry, where he claims that we are all designers and that the only thing that we should focus on is the Designing for Intent.

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