My Approach
DSGN1200 @ UQ
Design: Experience
Independently designed, co-ordinated, and delivered all lectures and studios for the brand-new Design: Experience (DSGN1200) course on the new university- wide Bachelor of Design program.
Managed course growth of over 300%.
In semester 2 2021, the overall SECaT score for the course averaged 4.56 out of 5. The overall SECaT score for my teaching averaged 4.75 out of 5. Praise centred on my clarity, passion, and use of real-world examples to illustrate design principles.
In semester 2 2022, the overall SECaT score for the course improved to an average of 4.89 out of 5. The overall SECaT score for my teaching also improved to an average of 4.83 out of 5. Praise centred on my delivery as being fun, approachable, enthusiastic, and engaging.
Course description:
Design is describing an existing scenario, imagining a new scenario, and implementing the desired change through the creation of products, services, and systems. It is as much about problem-finding as problem-solving and should be focused on meeting underlying human needs rather than on creating particular pre-determined outcomes.
In many consumer contexts, the incredible capacity of design to create more pleasurable experiences has been used to drive engagement, sales, and loyalty. In this studio, we asked students to employ these principles to different ends. This was a project-based course in which students were asked to apply the design process to the high-stakes medical context in order to mitigate feelings like alienation, anxiety, or frustration for people living with chronic illnesses. From this broad brief, students worked to find their own specific experiential problem to solve, orient a project towards a realistic goal, then to ideate, prototype, and develop a solution.
When design is done well, it is considerate of human needs and abilities. It caters to physical and cognitive abilities, values, beliefs, and emotions. It is an inherently social mediation between often competing aims. Because of this, it almost always involves complexity. As a result, our students’ work included navigating periods of ambiguity and uncertainty during the problem-finding phase, with particular solutions only becoming apparent in the final third of the semester.
There are many contexts in which human-centred experience design can help people to live more comfortable, fulfilled, or happier lives. Design for medicine and healthcare though, offered visceral opportunities for students to learn how to empathise with people who might be in unfamiliar situations. It can be a challenging context, especially at the outset of a degree program. However, the step-by-step development of a design solution aimed to build confidence in tackling real problems, which may have seemed insurmountable at the beginning.
DSGN2100 @ UQ
Design: Organisation
Collaboratively designed, co-ordinated, and tutored an entirely new iteration of the Design: Organisation (DSGN2100) course for the Bachelor of Design program.
Worked with an expert in Design Innovation who provided intellectual direction and lecture delivery for the course. My responsibilities spanned course planning, compliance oversight for university procedures, assessment management, and student support.
Student feedback was very enthusiastic - particularly about the relevance of the course for future career ambitions.
Course description:
Design, as a means of identifying and then meeting both manifest and latent user needs, relies on feasible paths to market for achieving impact through products and services. The design process can be applied to virtually any context, to produce results that better meet functional and emotional requirements. Significantly, this process can also be adapted and applied to the design of businesses themselves – to maximise the likelihood that good ideas are delivered in a technically and financially viable way. This helps to significantly reduce the risk of producing effective solutions, that do not reach the people who would benefit most.
In this studio, students were introduced to theories and tools for understanding how different approaches to design implementation work in the marketplace. They were challenged to analyse the structures of design-driven businesses in terms of their value propositions, costs, revenues, engagement channels, and customers. Subsequently, they were required to form their own teams, establish manifestos, and explore real-world problems that could be solved by their unique combinations of knowledge, skills, and motivations.
In an iterative process, insights from organisational analyses informed their selection of design problems, and the structures of their organisations were refined in response to the needs of the chosen context. This project-driven course culminated in a pitch for both a designed product or service, and an underlying organisation capable of delivering it in a sustainable way.
Through this course, students were exposed to the importance of being dynamic in their collective approach to solving problems through design. Organisational conditions that are conducive to radical (rather than incremental) innovation are based on a receptivity to feedback, and on being able to pivot to address changing landscapes of technological capabilities, social meanings, and customer expectations. Accordingly, this studio aimed to contribute to achieving a confidence and readiness for professional practice.