University of Massachusetts at Boston

Critical and Creative Thinking graduate program

College of Advancing & Professional Studies


Design for Living Complexities

MOOC--Collaborative Exploration--Graduate Course (CrCrTh 611)

July-August 2018


Explore critical thinking about design in a range of areas of life and its complexities

Design is about intentionality in construction, which involves a range of materials, a sequence of steps, and principles that inform the choice of material and the steps. Design always involves putting people as well as materials into place, which may happen by working with the known properties of the people and materials, trying out new arrangements, or working around their constraints (at least temporarily).

Critical thinking involves understanding ideas and practices better when we examine them in relation to alternatives. In a sense, critical thinking is in design from the start, because design cannot proceed without the idea that there are alternatives to the current way of doing things. This course exposes and explores alternative designs through history (showing that things have by no means always been the way they are now), "archeology of the present" (shedding light on what we might have taken for granted or left as someone else's responsibility/specialty), comparison (looking at the ways things are arranged in different organizations and cultures), and ill-defined problems (in cases of real-world "living complexity" that invite a range of responses).

Each course session takes up an issue about design, introduced in a presentation, followed by work on a case related to that issue and, at the start of the next session, reports on participants' design sketches to address the case. With each design sketch, participants add to or revise a growing set of principles for critical thinking in design. The design sketches and principles will, with participants' permission, be made accessible to a wider online audience and serve as part of an evolving online text for subsequent years.

Choose your level of participation: Three options
Level of involvement
Design sketches

Instructor Presentation
Workshop on case
Personnel
Graduate Course Register & pay, for credit. 5-8pm M & Th, July 16-Aug23, face2face or from a distance by hangout (link given on
private g+ community)
Students create sketch for each case and present during 1st hour of class

Delivered live during 2nd hour of class (or using prerecorded presentations), with student questions for instructor to address
3rd hour of class, with shared google docs worksheet & instructor coaching, and private g+ community (%)
Instructor, Peter Taylor, Director, Graduate Program in Critical & Creative Thinking (CCT)
Collaborative Exploration (CE). Open & free. Register via http://bit.ly/CEApply to participate in one of the CEs hosted by CCT alums. Meet by hangout for 1 hr/ week for 4 weeks (time TBA) & interact in the private google+ community for the CEs (%)
Participants develop 1 sketch (or more if they choose) through weekly CE sessions, with work-in-progress presentations in week 3
Youtubes of streamed presentations
Participants develop 1 sketch (or more if they choose) through individual work and google+ postings between weekly CE sessions

CCT alums as hosts of the CEs and active participants in the private google+ community for the CEs as well as the
public g+ community
for the MOOC.
MOOC Open & free. Simply join the public google+ community where interactions take place.

Presented and discussed in the public g+ community
Youtubes of streamed presentations
Discussed in the public g+ community

Instructor and CE hosts as active participants in the
public g+ community

Sessions
1. Waste
2. Play
3. Gathering into community
4. Enabling
5. Design-thinking education
6. Craft, improvisation, innovation and uptake
7. Standards, Conventions, Modularity and Infrastructure
8. Local particularity
9. Spanning distance
10. Integration of diverse social and material worlds
11. Keeping track
12. Improving by taking stock

Full Syllabus