DESIGN THEORY AND PRACTICE ES285

Any organization, business or venture grounds its value on how “meaningful” are its products (functionally, symbolically and emotionally). Design Theory and Practice (DTP) empowers students to create products that are meaningful, to people who use them and to society at large. The course has three purposes:

1. To inspire students about the power of design in new business creation. We will address questions such as: Why is design relevant in tech ventures? How does it create value? And, most of all, why is it fundamental for a technology entrepreneur/leader?
2. To enable them to move into action, by learning the theories and practice (mindsets, processes, methods) of design: Where do ideas come from? How to frame (and especially re-frame) a problem? How to understand what is meaningful to users? How to make a product desirable (functionally, emotionally and symbolically)? How to design and build the user interface of a product? How to test it? How to narrate and visualize a novel idea?
3. To co-explore, with the class and the instructor, the use of design as a leadership practice: How does a leader who masters design can better contribute to creation of value? How can we forge a new manifesto for leadership, inspired by design?

The course is intensively project-based. Students will work in teams on a complex innovation challenge proposed by a real corporation. They will suggest a more effective framing of the problem, and create a novel meaningful solution, with a special focus on the user interface.