Design Curriculum Part 1: Design Sketching
January 6th, 2010As we tweeted a few months ago, we have been heavily involved in creating and running a series of design projects in the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. Working with the full-time staff at the college we’ve put together a skills-focused introduction to I.D. for 2nd year undergraduate students.
For some time we’ve been keen to get involved with education at notion, and since doing so it has proved (as we hoped) to be massively rewarding.
The curriculum kicked off in early November, and to warm things up we got going with a Design Sketching workshop. The students were walked through 5 different sketching techniques in isolation, with the aim of arming them with the knowledge required to forge their own style. Keen to communicate our belief in the power of good design sketching we briefed them as follows:
“..This project is an introduction to design sketching. The goal of this exercise is to understand how design sketching can be used for the generation, evaluation and communication of ideas. The ability to sketch is fundamental to being a designer. It is in itself a creative way to concieve of and illustrate solutions to complex problems. No other medium provides the immediate thought/realisation feedback loop that sketching does.
Within the product development ecosystem there are many people with ideas. What differentiates a designer is his/her ability to rapidly give form to ideas through sketching. The value of this skill is immense. In addition to this, despite the advances in creative digital media, design sketching remains the most efficient and convincing tool a designer can use. Good use of sketching allows the designer to capture the spirit of the design concept and to communicate that to the client/team/tutor with no duplication of work…”
This post is Part 1 in a series coursing our progress, and that of the students through the program.