Des Inv 22 is an introductory course teaches design fundamentals required for future Design Innovation courses Christopher Myers Ananya Nandy Methods Prototyping Iterative Design Sketching 3D CAD Electronics Design Course Design Innovation 22 primarily serves as the fundamental foundation for students to have success in future Design Innovation Courses. With a heavy emphasis on creativity, iteration, and design, this course lays the groundwork to rapid prototype ideas with a combination of traditional and digital fabrication tools The corpus of students leans more heavily towards first semester freshmen but will also attract upperclassmen due to the creative nature of the class. Class registration is heavily impacted every semester and the attracts a wide breadth of different majors, allowing for different ideas from different subject matters to be shared Creativity The course heavily draws upon students to think creatively; to think beyond the first cast and explore more profoundly the concepts of form and motion. Des Inv 22 brings a more investigative light to making. The first assignment that the students complete focuses on elegance and motion. They are required to create Origami and Kirigami and modify it such that it creates motion. This hybrid approach on the craft focused on two key elements: Traditional Craft and Electronic motion. Origami focused on the delicate nature of folding while still creating robust structures and figures. More than just a sculpture, a key component to the assignment was to introduce an element of motion to the model. Iteration One of the core tenants of the course is to utilize both digital and traditional fabrication techniques to create iterative prototypes for rapid fabrication. For example, utilizing slots instead of fixed hole positions allows for teams to find the proper position without the need to create multiple static prototypes. These skills are transferable and will help students lower production costs of future prototypes but more importantly, reduce headache when it comes to optimizing prototypes for final products. Design Creativity is a core pillar of the class. We stress not only the manufacturing and production ideals to design but we also believe that a key piece of ingenuity is required for design: Invokes Wonderment or Humor All Projects must have a humorous element or invoke a sense of wonderment with the user/observer. People should say “wow”, “how does it work”, “how did they do that” or laugh or giggle upon seeing your project in final form. Although a strange request, we purposely required this for students to think more of the assignment than just the rubric; for them to really believe that what they created would be interesting to themselves and to others. This leads to creative uses of mechanisms that might not be utilized otherwise. We stress the importance of product design as well. Specifically, we pull back on the reliance of digital media as a tool and to first work through traditional means. Tools The course is prototyping: bringing ideas from concept to form. We want to prepare the students in a way which would give them the structure and foundation to design prototypes. Allowing the students to create prototypes in low-cost materials to bring dimensionality to their idea quickly with little investment. Only then do we recommend moving to the computer and prototype from a digital standpoint. We heavily stress the use of traditional techniques with a combination of 3d printing with the use of laser-cutting along with other forms of digital fabrication. |