ENGS 15.15 Design Survivor

This course is for students who are interested in designing desirable products, experiences, and services that people want to spend time with. Desirable in the context of design can be defined in many ways—meaningful, delightful, cool, covetable, viral, efficient, and more. In today's landscape where attention is scarce and connection with human meaning and emotion matters more than ever, developing the skills to create desirable designs makes your efforts more likely to succeed. The course draws on four intellectual foundations: 1) The applied psychology of creativity — what cognitive science and psychology tell us about how creative capacity actually works, 2) Applied creative skill development — how to deliberately train attention, perception, judgment, and point of view through practice. 3) The modern history of the concept of creativity — how our understanding of creativity has evolved, and what that means for how we cultivate it today. 4) The psychology of desirability and impact — the psychological concepts most useful for understanding why certain creative work resonates and how to design for outsized effect.

In this course, students study real-world cases of exceptional examples by Apple, IDEO, Swarovski, Nike, and others that strategically design for desirability, then apply these insights to completely different domains—from health literacy campaigns to personal expression with emerging technologies to the future of growing food. The course uses experiential, analogical, and case-based methods. Each week brings a new psychological concept grounded in research, a case study that exemplifies it brilliantly, and a design challenge that asks you to apply the concept somewhere new. Weekly collections, critique panels, and tight feedback loops help you develop and refine your own design point of view. By the end, you'll have a diverse portfolio, a deeper understanding of how creativity has been understood and studied, and a series of projects that demonstrate your evolving designerly point of view.

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Department-Specific Course Categories

Engineering Sciences