Vital Ideation
From Wikiversity
|
Vital Ideation (for your everyday life) was a Spring 2008 Student Designed Course at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Boston, MA. The course focused on the idea of viewing the world through different "lenses" to influence design.
[edit] Looking Back
Ultimately, we consider the Spring 2008 offering of Vital Ideation a tremendous success. It was a great first step towards student organized courses, running in parallel with another course, How Stuff Works.
Several students dropped Vital Ideation during the semester, citing other work and inability to attend lectures and discussions as reasons. Many students did not blog regularly, and completed a large chunk of their blog posts in the last few days of the course. In potential future iterations, more frequent checkpoints should be established. A final reflection was required, which was a good opportunity to look back on the course and reflect on lectures and what conclusions students came to as a result.
Having outside speakers was a tremendous success. We were initially worried that we would be unable to convince people to come speak to a ragtag gang of students at some college somewhere, but people were enthusiastic to come speak with us about their fields. These lectures were extremely interesting, and perfectly provided the desired 'flavoring' experience we wanted in the course. We highly recommend that future students ensure that they are proactive about contacting speakers and keeping them in the loop regarding what they should be talking about and when and how to come to their college.
It is extremely important to get an adviser who is interesting in the course. We were fortunate to have Lucy Dunne, a visiting faculty member, advise us. She came to almost every lunch lecture, and kept us on track at the end of the course by requiring deliverables to be handed in. Our tremendous thanks to her!
In conclusion: Organizing a student course is extremely possible, external guests would love to speak with you about their passions, and be sure to have checkpoints along the way to prevent work from building up.
Good luck!
[edit] Course Background, Description, and Expectations
Vital Ideation was a one-credit student organized course during Spring 2008 that focused on viewing design through different "lenses".
As a one-credit course, each week included three hours of expected work time. This translated into a one-hour lecture, a one-hour discussion time, and one hour of blog writing and individual ideation. In addition, students carried a design notebook with them and kept a record of their thoughts and ideas. The notebook was one of the final deliverables for the course.
A blog was set up for Olin College students to post their deliverables to. Visit the Olin College Vital Ideation blog.
To recap:
- All the time:
- Carry a design notebook, and write in it with thoughts and ideas (especially those related to the week's unit)
- Weekly:
- Listen to our guest lectures, or talks on similar material online
- Discuss the theme and brainstorm ways to use it in design with other people
- Reflect on the unit and your thoughts and designs stemming from it in your blog.
- Final Project:
- Organize and present highlights from your design notebook
- Write a final reflection of the course and how it has made you think about your personal design philosophies.
[edit] Competencies Covered
Olin College employs a competency system. The following competencies were addressed by the Vital Ideation course:
- Life Long Learning
- Context
- Design
- Diagnosis
[edit] What is a "Lens"?
Just what exactly is a lens? A lens is a way of seeing the world; or, more specifically, it is a way of filtering the world. It is a way of seeing components, it is a way of focusing. For Vital Ideation, our design lenses are just that. They allow us to focus our ideation to a specific manner, to a specific set of ideas.
Important to note is that lenses are indirectly apparent post-facto, while brainstorming techniques are not. For example, when some design makes use of a lens, such as biomimicry, the designer could point out "hey, look at how this is like a wing, and this is like a muscle." This would be opposed to a brainstorming technique, which would not be apparent. "Hey, look at how this was thought of using bi-association and post-it notes!" Case in point.
[edit] Participants
- Greg Marra (Olin College)
- Erik "Danger" Kennedy (Olin College)
- Lauren Glanville (Olin College)
- Evan Morikawa (Olin College)
- Ellen Chisa (Olin College)
- Philip Chung (Olin College)
- Hari Iyer (Olin College)
- Alyshia Olsen (Olin College)
- Mel "who graduated?" Chua (for the first few weeks, at least - we shall see how my schedule holds)
- Marco Morales (Olin College)
[edit] Schedule
[edit] Meetings
- Thursdays - 7:00 - 8:00pm - We met every week on Thursday evenings for brainstorming.
- Tuesdays and Thursdays - 12:00 - 1:00pm - We had this time reserved for potential guest lectures.
[edit] Calendar
| Unit | Date | Time (EDT) | Speaker |
| Introduction to Vital Ideation | 2/5 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Matt Jadud |
| Sticky Ideas | 2/14 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Steve Gold |
| Ecomimicry | 2/28 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Nina Fefferman |
| Art and Engineering | 3/4 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Brian Bingham |
| Design For Fun | 3/25 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Barry Kudrowitz |
| 4/1 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Ellen Thompson | |
| Design for the Next Guy | 4/10 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Richard Miller |
| Advertising | 4/17 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Ian Dapot |
| Radical Interdisciplinary Design | 4/24 | 12:00 - 1:00 | Diana Dabby |
[edit] Speakers
- Matt Jadud is a visiting professor at Olin College in electrical engineering and computer science. He has interests in concurrency in robotics and computing, human factors interface design, and software design. Although he is a visiting professor and still alive, students already have hopes of establishing a Matt Jadud Professor of Computer Science chair and awarding it to him.
- Steven Gold is an instructor at Olin College. Steve has started several businesses and is an entrepreneurial guru. He also has 2 adorable children with curly hair.
- Nina Fefferman studied the spread of the WOW virus. She is at Rutgers and we will be teleconferencing.
- Brian Bingham is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Olin College. He will be giving a talk on modular design.
- Barry Kudrowitz is a PhD student at MIT studying designing for fun. He holds patents on Nerf guns which makes him awesome.
- Ellen Thompson is Education & Program Director at the Boston Children's Museum, which is an extremely fun place to visit.
- Richard Miller is the President of Olin College, and a pigeon racing enthusiast.
- Ian Dapot is a designer at a local branch of an international design firm.
- Diana Dabby is an electrical engineering and music composition professor at Olin College. Before coming to Olin, she taught simultaneously at MIT and Julliard. She also really like butterflies and Ice Cream.
[edit] Units
[edit] An Introduction to Day-to-Day Ideation
Tag: daytoday
Carrying a design notebook :: looking at the world from the perspective of design :: a brief history of design :: who designs, what they design, why they design it :: a general background of design as it currently stands as a field
[edit] Sticky Ideas
Tag: stickyideas
Based around Made to Stick by Chip Heath :: some ideas travel faster and farther than others; this week is an investigation of why :: trying to make the things around us sticky :: how do we make important things, ie. safety, public events, etc. sticky? :: what is sticky now? :: what things are hard to make sticky?
[edit] Advertising
Tag: advertising
Design that inspires us to give people our money says something; this week investigates that aspect :: what are people attracted to in advertising? :: how can we apply advertising to daily life, ie. group projects to business ventures :: what are some of the best advertisements out there currently?
[edit] Resources
Word of Mouth Marketing Association
[edit] Biomimicry
Tag: biomimicry
We can learn a lot from looking at animals and plants and the way they interact; how do we apply this to design? :: how does one generalize the behaviors of organisms into behaviors for devices?
[edit] Ecomimicry
Tag: ecomimicry
We can learn a lot from looking at systems in the natural world; how can we apply this to design? :: this week would be a study of everything from how the natural world recovers from disasters, how each biome maintains a balance, how evolution and “survival of the fittest” can be applied to design :: epidemiology and design :: the World of Warcraft “virus” :: weather :: translating natural distributed systems into useful design
[edit] Universal Icon
2-week unit
Tag: universalicon
Some things, from stop lights to the Coca-Cola logo, are recognized almost the entire world over; what are these things? :: what symbols can people identify with immediately? :: how do colors and shapes effect the way people think and feel about things :: what makes a universal icon?
[edit] Modular Design
2-week unit
Tag: modulardesign
Many designed things can be broken down into compartments, individually analyzable :: This is ECS 2.0, but from a design perspective :: what things use compartments or “modular design,” and what similarities can be drawn between them? :: how do modules function as a whole :: how do we incorporate ECS ideas such as feedback, effort & flow, and compartments into design?
[edit] Design for Fun
2-week unit
Tag: designforfun
How can things be made fun? :: what’s fun? :: how can a focus on fun be used to improve design? :: since “fun” is an alternative for “payment,” making design fun is often profitable :: the psychology of fun
[edit] Design for the Next Guy
2-week unit
Tag: thenextguy
Some things are designed so that the next person has the opportunity to modify them at will; in other words, some design in recyclable :: the Stata center at MIT was designed so that the rooms were somewhat modular; they could serve either as a lab, a lecture room, an office, etc :: Olin College was designed so that it could host a variety of types of engineering education, testing them for the rest of the nation :: what are other things that are designed for ease of future designers? :: what is easily customizable and prepared for future innovation?
[edit] Radical Interdisciplinary Design
Tag: radicalinterdisciplinary
Speaker: Diana Dabby (Olin Professor)
Date: April 24th
The final unit will be a one week study of combining radically different disciplines into some sort of design :: Diana Dabby has developed a method of music composition based on chaos mathematics :: what other design uses ideas from extremely different disciplines?
