Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Designing and understanding spaces used by people. The iterative process of making and criticizing, experiencing and analyzing spatial form. Compositional ideas for form-making. Critical thinking applied to design. Computers are the principal medium used in this course for form-making and visualization.

COURSE DETAILS:

Spatial Design is concerned with understanding and then designing thoughtful spaces used by people; people interact with space every day and can be quite unaware that a designer shaped that space and experience for them. The more thoughtful the shaping the better the space. The better the space, the more memorable, enjoyable and meaningful the experience for the user or inhabitant.

But, space is hard to learn because it is unseen - it is the glue that holds compoistions together, and in many ways is more important than the shapes and objects that we see. In digital interactions this is profoundly more important and more complex. The course will take the approach of "scales" of space  and use design languages to allow students to understand and then design for those scales - so, graphic space, product space, room and context, architectural scale space, and the space between architecture and builidngs in the urban scale. The end goal is to understand how any intervention using deisgn that we make at any scale affects the others and is nested in other scales, and to learn to see and sense when space is present, or not. We cannot merely intellectually undestand this however, if we are going to design for people, we have to learn how to design in these languages and scales. 

Projects are due each week and feedback provided to progress weekly in class using the critique methodology for eveluation and iteration of results.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

To lay a groundwork of understanding how to approach complex and ill-defined problems and to apply methodologies such as "design thinking" to properly frame a design proposal and interventions, and to see how our decisions affect form, and the users clarity, understanidng and pleasure in using and/or inhabiting the spaces, products and experiences we design. The course exposes students to professional design in a variety of professional fields, from graphic and visual deisgn to product design, and ultimately to User Experience and Intercation Design.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Required:
Moleskine, "Artplus", sketchbook (A4).

Required Reading

Project 1:
“Graphic Design: the new basics” Ellen Lupton, + course readings, Instructor

 

Project 5:
“Graphic Design: the new basics” Ellen Lupton

“Why Fonts Matters”,  Sarah Hyndman

 

Project 7:
“Elements of Design”, Gail Greet Hannah

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: