Susanne Stauch (@Susa) and I are collaborating around building a new product design course format for university students. Starting with her own undergraduate students at Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) this coming semester.
In this x-week course we will be focusing on developing product prototypes relevant to the OpenCare approach towards provision of health- and social care. With the pre-defined aim of running crowdfunding campaigns for the products that come out of the process (this is the course deliverable as set by the department, Kickstarter is partially financing the course.
What do you think of our proposed set up for the undergraduate course?
Talks to introduce the theme and key concepts
Talk giving overview of innovative health- and social care products, and their business models
I also teach (I spent about half my time doing it …) and would be happy to help.
I’m a bit puzzled and do not feel capable of providing (useful) feedback, simply because I am not able to grasp what the central topic of the course is – I’m sorry to be so ignorant, but I thought it wouldn’t harm me to be honest about it
Is “product design” is about creating things, I mean real 3D objects? That’s what I imagined. Then I would expect the course to implement a “learning-by-doing” approach.
thanks for getting in touch. To give you a brief idea of the project, check out the website (in progress) HACKING UTOPIA for the University project. There I collect inspiring projects, methods and texts to help us get started. The plan so far is to kick-off with an intense workshop week before the semester starts (somewhere between April 4 - 17) where we (@nadia and hopefully Ezio Manzini) introduce Service Design / Design Thinking to the students and jump into the topic. The goal is to have a first concept or idea for a product/service in the context of OpenCare at the beginning of the semester which then can be tested, iterated, improved in the time following. In our case the degree of working on social transformation has to remain rather small because we have the deliverable for the crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter (products/services) which needs to be developed in the same time. I think it is realistic to induce transformation/change by implementing little tweaks and improvements with our ideas, that’s at least the goal. I want the students (who study product design - yes, making products, artefacts and things) to get familiar with a wider understanding of design as a transformative skill not limited to stuff but open enough to have social impact (which of course products have always had in a way).
The term runs from April 18 until July 22, by then we need prototypes and crowdfunding campaigns.
Unfortunately I can’t make it to LOTE5 because I will be traveling in February (and as far as I understood Nadia the dates are set, because I could come a week earlier), however I want to start a conversation about how we can cross pollinate and interact with the University project and the bigger goal of the OpenCare Research project. So as much as we have some constraints in form of deliverables and a certain content environment due to the faculty the course will be held in (product design) we want to contribute to the bigger picture as well as get input and feedback from you guys. Does this make sense?
I saw that you will be running some workshops at the LOTE5, what exactly is your background? Maybe you are interested in collaborating with our project?
