Selected topics in design innovation. This course cannot be used to complete any course or unit requirement for College of Engineering undergraduates.

This two-unit course explores how novel design practices can be deployed and leveraged within the existing cultures of many technology companies and startups. Designs techniques to look beyond the immediate will be explored, studied, and operationalized. This course addresses long-term effects of design decisions and offers strategies for exposing long-term pitfalls, problems, and negative effects. The goal is to develop proficiency within existing design practices to enable a long-range design framing that will result in broader, more sustainable technological and societal impacts while avoiding quick near-term solutions that have detrimental long-term consequences. The ethical issues of balance and tradeoff between these real design challenges will be confronted and operationalized through class activities and interrogations.

Through the new concept of Ancestry Thinking, this course will propose ideas to broaden our understanding of the technological ecosystem we live in. Throughout the semester students will discuss ways to internalize what would otherwise remain as externalities or byproducts of technological and design developments. Our goal is to enable future technology practitioners to build holistic narratives around their resulting final designs and within their design practice.

Repeat Rules