Sustainable Impact

Chiharu Shiota, Between the Lines, 2017

Form & Senses

by Elif Ozcan Vieira

When it comes to design, there’s definitely more than meets the eye. This course explores how senses other than sight, like hearing and touch, play a role in designing products. Discover how sound design, texture design and light design can influence form and create a multi-sensory user experience.

This elective course goes beyond the visual experience by exploring how form giving can be different when the process involves sound, texture or light.

Build an understanding of sensory perception when it comes to products. Learn tools to incorporate sensory properties in design. Develop skills for designing tailored sensory experiences. Create collages or mood boards as inspiration to understand, for example, what colours or what forms could be used in a design. Experience how technology also plays a role, through things like sensors, speakers and lights.

Discover a new and exploratory design space. Consider if an object had a sound, what would it be like? If that sound had a texture, what would it feel like? And how would lighting the object influence the sensory experience? Put what you have learned into practice in both individual and group projects.

Deepen knowledge and skills for form giving as well as experience design and learn how to create inspiration for your future design work.

“I will be proud when students inherently think of these other senses. That they understand that there is a dependency between different sensory experiences. The dominance of visual experience is there, but other sensory experiences are very complimentary. I want them to understand what materials they can use and what sounds they are interested in and really create and inspiration space for themselves.”

Design Didactics

by Jelle Zijlstra

Just as there is no single way of learning, there is no universal way of teaching. But when it comes to teaching design, didactics can help with finding the best method for different situations. It’s about adjusting the knowledge and the theory to the student that is in front of you. And in this course, it’s students teaching students.

Whether your aim is to teach or not, this elective course will help deepen your own understanding of the design process, design techniques and methodology. This is done by focussing on the principles of didactics and how to create education related to design and the design process.

Explore different learning styles as well as how to align learning goals, activities and assessments. Delve into the essence of competencies, how to give feedback, and how to deliver effective instruction in front of a group. And learn about coaching styles, conversation skills, and how to help students reflect.

Through experiential learning, students will put what they learn into practice as they support teachers in Design Project 2. As teaching assistants, students engage in a deeper way with the learning process.

The course makes students aware of their own learning process by exploring the learning process of others. It makes design students more reflective, more empathetic and verbally competent. And it may inspire some to become the design teachers of the future.

“The students make me proud because they are very good at what they do. I hear from other students about how much they are helped by the didactics students because they are closer to the students and understand them better. I’m proud to pass on the knowledge of didactics, but it’s broader than that. It’s a set of soft skills that can help engineers a lot in their professional life.”