MUO-E3042 - Emerging Designs, Lecture, 1.11.2021-10.12.2021

Topic outline

• Assignments
  The assignments are described here, and are to be returned to here, al in their respective return boxes. Please return them in pdf-format, if possible. The guidance for videos to be added later.
  

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    Reflective essay Assignment

    Note: Deadline extended to 21.12.2021, at 23:59 Finnish time.
    

    Write a reflective essay about your process and outcome of the design assignment. Emphasize how your designerly insights developed, how design solutions and task/problem framing co-evolved. Also include a chapter about teamwork and analyze your own contribution, and that of the others -emphasizing the positive contributions of each, as well as you all as a group with more critical view. Ensure you have a clear structure in your document.

    You can consider e.g. the following aspects: Concept creation; Task-solution co-evolution, and moments of problem framing and re-framing; Knowledge building; The moments of decisions about the design; Team dynamics; Own contribution; Your growth as a designer.

    You can also focus to subset of the above if you prefer.
    

    If needed, you can have a chapter also about the possible clash the course content and your personal take to design as an activity. What is design to you? As mentioned in the book below (Lawson & Dorst), design can be presented as a knowledge building process or purely as problem solving. You may have other views -reading the book (or just the chapter) may frame and ground your view further or even change it.
    

    Ensure you have at least four or five relevant references from this course or further; stick to academic referencing practices with a list of the references at the end. Length of the essay should be 4-5 pages, with font size 11, one column, 1,5 line-height. Text is enough in this essay, no need to visualize.
    

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    An excellent article I hope everyone reads, for making some thoughts explicit about your designerly growth process, potentially helping the essay:

    • Ball, L. J., & Christensen, B. T. (2019). Advancing an understanding of design cognition and design metacognition: Progress and prospects. Design Studies, 65, 35–59. Article here

    For some, the following article by Dorst may give further ideas how co-evolution may be used in rather complex problems as the ones in this course. Perhaps you can reflect how you proceeded wrt to this:

    • Dorst, K. (2019). Co-evolution and emergence in design. Design Studies, 65, 60–77. Article here
      

    A book (in e-format here) which provides you a good overview of what design is as an activity, and how the expertise in it develops. At least Chapter 2  is a beneficial read to ground design thinking and provides you potential further references:
    

    • Lawson, Bryan, and Kees Dorst. Design Expertise, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. Here

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    If you agree, kindly consider copying the statement below to the front page of the essay. It would help us in developing research insights of the course progress:

    I agree my essay to be used as research data for design research studies by Severi Uusitalo and Markus Ahola. In such use the data shall be in anonymized form so that not me, nor the team can be identified from it.

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    A minor penalty will be added from the points per each day the essay is late from the deadline.

    
    
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    Final presentation and supporting material Assignment

    Deliver a presentation primarily in pdf-format here. The presentation may be done in Powerpoint or other tool, and have videos, props etc., but upload here a pdf version. You can upload also supporting material in video formats.

    Concepts are expected to be developed with some linkage to findings from own team and the other teams. A cohesive chain of argumentation from your results, the goals you have set, and your concept creation process is appreciated in grading. You can focus with the setting of your objective: a well-founded concept addressing a reasonably limited objective is better than a vague general presentation of issues with little conceptual clarity.
    

    
    

    Presentation: 10-15 mins presentation + 10-15 mins discussion.

    Short, entertaining and informative video explaining the whole concept and/or a use scenario.
    

    The guidance for the website content in the attached document here.
    

    
    

    ADDITIONAL INFO ON WEBSITE MATERIALS (on Dec 14th):

    Please, update your submission so that you use this MyCourse site to deliver ALL TEXT & IMAGES ZIPPED. If your submission is more than 400 MB, contact Jonna.

    
    

    
    

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    Mid-term presentation Assignment

    Your team's mid-term presentation, and possible other, supporting, curated material if applicable. Only one from the team needs to submit. Presentation in pdf format.

    The presentation should be max 15 mins, please prepare also for a 15 min Q&A discussion.

    The presentation should include also visuals, giving the audience a good understanding of the objective (e.g. the storyboard scenario or similar), argumentation, and the plan of the team.