Class is no longer in session...

From January 22 to April 29, 2020, this site will serve as the online portal for Design Seminar: Contemporary Practice for 28 students, 26 undergraduates, 2 graduates, and occasional visitors.

Note: these summaries are written at the end of each semester by Mindy Seu. Each week, this class invited an interdisciplinary designer to speak about their practice and lead a reading discussion or exercise that connected to their current work.

Lectures

Neema Githere

Kristian Henson

Yotam Hadar

David Reinfurt

Federico Pérez Villoro

Gregor Huber

Jane Wong

Shannon Finnegan

Ayham Ghraowi & Matt Wolff

Tracy Ma

Yasaman Sheri

Laura Coombs

Readers

In order to encourage active participation, 2-3 students were assigned note takers per week. All students then sequenced a curated selection of the class blocks into readers using print.are.na. These were intended to be printed using Lulu, but they were left unprinted due to the remote teaching at the end of the semester. All PDFs are viewable in this class channel. All note takers, lecture recordings, and Are.na channels can be found here.

Personal Note

I really enjoyed this class because I was able to invite a range of designers and hear about their work. I was pleased with the reading response and final reader prompts, since they helped moved forward reading discussions but also encouraged students to reflect on what projects/designers/quotes/references resonated with them. The latter half of the semester was online due to the COVID-19 edit so all lectures moved online. I found that students still participated and actively used the chat function. It would be interesting to see how a chat might be incorporated into an on-site class as well. If I were to make edits, I would do a thorough run-through of metadata and descriptions on Are.na on the first day of class, as well as assigning note takers and discussion facilitators per week.

I started taking attendance screenshots and it's a nice memory.