Design For Understanding

This class adopts a learning-by-doing approach and we take process very seriously! Students work in design studio-type classes. They are expected to participate in the conversation, provide constructive comments to peer’s work, sketch ideas, take notes, and come prepared each class to show progress. To fully understand design concepts and improve the quality of the work, students are encourage to visualize and prototype their ideas, and iterate many times.

The class is structured in three units:

• Unit 1: Understanding cognitive processes & design basics (learning process, cognition, Gestalt principles, color, visual composition, design principles)
• Unit 2: Applying design principles to explain science (design research, visual communication) 
• Unit 3: building an argument with data (data visualization, storytelling, visual narrative)

The class involves two or three projects where students translate complex and messy content—such as scientific concepts, processes, emotions—into valuable and meaningful information. Each project introduces a new information design challenge, aims at specific target audiences (undergraduate students, high school students, clients investors or University faculty and staff), involves different formats and sizes (posters, booklets, decks), and adds various constraints (working by hand, using a reduced number of colors, working digitally). At the beginning of each project, in-class exercises focus on practicing a specific component (design pages) or introduce a new concept (visual composition).

Throughout the semester, students write blog posts aimed at demonstrating their understanding on key concepts discussed each week in readings and class lectures. The goal of these blog posts is to help students connect and apply new concepts into practice, and demonstrate their learning. Transferring learning helps build new mental models, stored new knowledge and assimilate new concepts. Some posts help document class progress and work.

Teaching Design in a non-design schools is relatively new. A hunger to learn design skills has expanded the offering of design programs and courses from traditional design schools, like Parsons, to non-design schools, Stanford University, Harvard Business School, and more recently, Princeton University.

In the last five years, a similar phenomenon has been occurring at Princeton as students have shown strong interest in learning design. As this demand grows, design and design thinking related courses have been created as elective classes and open to all students from freshmen to seniors.