This page lists courses held in Jacobs Hall during fall 2019. To see Jacobs Hall course listings from other semesters, please visit our primary course listings page.
This class explores the formal, structural, and functional possibilities of bending and folding structures. Beginning with an investigation of origami and takeami, the students will learn how the traditional Japanese arts of paper-folding and bamboo-weaving can enable designs of mind-blowing complexity and beauty. While these crafts are thousands of years old, they are still in use and by now go far beyond decorative designs. In fact, thanks to a scientific approach, bending and folding techniques are being constantly improved and can be found in various innovative fields, ranging from fashion, industrial design, architecture, medicine, aviation, and space technology. With the application of modern computational design tools, it has become much easier to generate complex bending and folding patterns and to simulate their transformation behavior. This knowledge can be used, for example, to design deployable structures with highly-efficient packaging strategies or kinetic systems that take advantage of flexible folding, compliant mechanism, or bending-active construction techniques. These developments shed new light on an old topic and enable a great starting point for new discoveries. In class, students will learn various tools for simulating patterns that take advantage of straight-line and curved-line folding. Over the course of the semester, students will work in small interdisciplinary teams and in their final project develop their own functional bending or folding structure with a strong practical application.
Simon Schleicher | 3 units
This semester-long course introduces bioengineering seniors to engineering design methods and project-based learning in small teams, with a strong emphasis on need-based solutions for biomedical needs through needs identification, setting specifications, solution concept generation & down selection, prototyping, and testing. In addition to design, topics covered include project management, FDA regulatory, intellectual property, ethics, and translation (clinical collaboration and/or commercialization). All seniors work closely with healthcare professionals (UCSF, Stanford, UC Davis medical centers).
Amy Herr | 4 units
This course involves the design and prototype of large-scale technology-intensive systems. Possible design projects, incorporating infrastructure systems and areas such as transportation and hydrology, include watershed sensor networks, robot networks for environmental management, mobile Internet monitoring, open societal scale systems, crowdsourced applications, traffic management, and more.
Scott Moura | 3 Units
Similarly to how mobile devices revolutionized the way we interact with our electronic devices, Virtual Reality represents another exciting paradigm shift in human computer interaction. The VR DeCal teaches students to use Unity and the Oculus Rift to construct their own VR applications. Students will get exposure to different kinds of VR apps and work in teams to build their own from scratch. After completion of the course, we welcome interested students to join an existing project team with VR@Berkeley or pitch their own project.
Paxtan Laker, Austin Davis, Benjamin Wu, Brian Wu, Jake Mercer
In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of web development through the Ruby on Rails framework. In addition, other principles such as git, databases, and more will be taught simultaneously due to their relation with web development. At a high level, the course will be divided between lecture and programming – culminating in an open-ended final group project.
Frederick Kim & Freddy Cervantes
The design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. User-centered design and task analysis. Conceptual models and interface metaphors. Usability inspection and evaluation methods. Analysis of user study data. Input methods (keyboard, pointing, touch, tangible) and input models. Visual design principles. Interface prototyping and implementation methodologies and tools. Students will develop a user interface for a specific task and target user group in teams.
Eric Paulos | 4 units
This course, ideal for students who are looking for an introduction to the broad world of design, covers design careers, design fields, histories of design and ethics in design. Students will gain language for analyzing and characterizing designs. In this course, you will be learning design both from theoretical and historical perspectives, and from studio-based design exercises and projects. The weekly assignments and final projects will emphasize foundational design skills in observation, ideation, problem finding and problem-solving, form-giving, communication, and critique.
Yoon Bahk | 2 units
This introductory course aims to expose you to the mindset, skillset, and toolset associated with design. It does so through guided applications to framing and solving problems in design, business, and engineering. Specifically, you will learn approaches to noticing and observing, framing and reframing, imagining and designing, and experimenting and testing as well as for critique and reflection. You will also have a chance to apply those approaches in various sectors.
Emily Au | 3 units
Good ideas alone are not the key to being a great designer or innovator. Rather, it is the strong process and communication skills that will make you stand out as a design practitioner and leader. In today’s landscape of product design and innovation, great visual communicators must know how to 1) effectively and confidently sketch by hand, 2) understand and utilize the basics of visual design, and 3) tell captivating and compelling stories. This course, offered in a project-based learning format, will give participants practice and confidence in their ability to communicate visually.
Purin Phanichphant | 3 units
This course teaches concepts, skills, and methods required to design, prototype, and fabricate physical objects. Each week relevant techniques in 2D and 3D modeling and fabrication are presented, along with basic electronics. Topics include a range of prototyping and fabrication techniques including laser-cutting, 3D modeling and 3D printing, soldering, and basic circuits.
Chris Myers | 3 units
In this one unit P/NP course, students will attend the weekly speaker series associated with the course L&S 25 Thinking Through Art and Design@Berkeley: Responsible Design from Bits to Buildings. Each week, speakers will present projects from their professional careers that showcase real world design challenges. The series will focus on design and its connection to the arts across a range of disciplinary contexts; informed by key themes explored at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, the course is built around a matrix of scales (from bits to buildings and cities) and issues, such as sustainability, democracy, and inclusion.
Robert Kett | 1 unit
In Reimagining Mobility, students will envision meaningful interactions between people and different transportation modalities. Looking 10-15 years into the future, they will address elements such as car sharing, public transportation, autonomous driving, and more. The first phase of the course will focus on the early stages of the design process, including problem framing and user research. The second phase of the course will focus on the latter stages of the design process, including proposing solutions, prototyping, and storytelling.
Purin Phanichphant | 3 units
This course is an intensive, project-based course that focuses on design of interactive artifacts that use emerging technologies. Students are led through a sequence of projects of varying lengths (from one week to three weeks). This course is intended to develop student skills in designing with technology as a material. Projects include both individual and team activities, with teams frequently changing in size and composition.
Adam Hutz, Eric Paulos, & Vivek Rao | 4 units
This course provides hands-on and real-world experience in the development of innovative and realistic customer-driven engineered products, services or systems. Design methods and tools are introduced, and the student’s design ability is developed in a capstone design project or equivalent. The course is organized around the following modules: design research, analysis & synthesis, concept generation & creativity, prototyping, communication & visualization. Students will be expected to use tools and methods of professional practice and use these tools to consider the social, economic and environmental implications of their products, services or systems. There is an emphasis on hands-on innovative thinking and professional practice. We will engage product designers from industry as speakers and coaches.
Kosa Goucher-Lambert | 3 units
The human-centered design decal is a Berkeley Innovation-hosted, introductory class to design theory and practice, with a focus on human-centered design. Students learn about the design process and industry, practice using industry-standard tools, engage in hands-on activities during class and in homework assignments, and complete a midterm and a final design project solving problems that they care about. The 2-unit P/NP course meets once a week for 2 hours. There are no prerequisites – this class is for anyone interested in learning about human-centered design.
Angela Huang, Ryan Zeng, Michael Wroblewski
Typography is a UC Berkeley DeCal course intended to teach students about the foundations and applications of typography. The course will emphasize on building a base of design knowledge and assignments in which students will apply their knowledge and creativity to both evaluate design examples as well as produce their own original work. Students will also hone their critical eye and their own stylistic development.
Emily Hill, Tony Zhao
In this class, students will be introduced to the history, art, and practices of photography in the modern world. Students will learn how to manually operate a digital SLR camera, how to use lighting in conjunction with posing to create compositions, and how to post-process RAW photos. Different disciplines will also be taught and include portraiture, landscape, architecture, product, studio and more. Over the semester, students will learn critiques of photos and develop a more artistic eye for photos.
Renee Utter, Lalyn Yu
This course aims to provide students with a foundation in fundamental aerospace engineering principles. The course will consist of three sections: the engineering design process, structures, and aerodynamics. Students will participate in lectures and in-class practice exercises, as well as three aerospace-related design projects throughout the semester. Those who wish to learn more and contribute to hands-on building projects may concurrently join the Aerospace SAE club.
Sangyeon Lee, Dennis Lin, Joseph Skelley
This course is intended for those who are interested in learning the fundamentals of web design, or are looking to get started building websites and applications. Throughout the semester, students will understand how websites work and utilize languages including HTML, CSS and Javascript to build them. In addition, students will learn basic principles of user interface design, using tools such as Adobe XD or Figma for creating prototypes. By the end of this course, a student should feel confident enough to create their own personal site.
Myles Domingo
This course is designed for students who are technically proficient in Illustrator and are looking to learn design theory and principles, such as color theory and typography, to apply their technical skills to projects. This course is not meant to give all of the tools and knowledge to become a professional designer; However, Graphic Design Principles will provide an essential foundation to start careers in design.
Kiana Aryan, Sasha Dimov
This course teaches graphic design through the use of Photoshop and Illustrator. It is suitable for students who have never touched either piece of software, or have some experience and are looking to extend their technical skill. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CC will be taught in a series of comprehensive tutorials, complemented with exercises to perform during class and at home. These exercises give students the opportunity to practice the tools, create designs, and exercise their creativity. We will also explore graphic design trends and their applications, and learn to receive and give critiques in order to improve your design work.
Sahil Sanghvi, Arthur Yu, Brandon David, Diana Fan, Jacqueline Zhang, Valerie Tan
The Board Game Design DeCal focuses on the design and development of board games for social impact. Creating games capable of influencing change in society allows students to create with a purposeful lens in mind, as they approach a problem at hand. Board Games can be effective tools to teach players important skills, such as empathy, privilege, and sustainability. Through this class, students will create a board game to tackle an important social problem in our everyday society.
Crystal Chan, Alan Jian, Alex Hajir, Amanda Guan, Desiree Nayak
This course is a deep dive into the creation of games, from beginning to end. Over the course of the semester, students will pitch a game, form small teams, and build out a project from start to finish with help from the instructors. Students are not required to have any prior game development experience but it is strongly recommended that a student taking the course either has basic art abilities or basic programming abilities. They will also learn about the different roles that exist within the industry, how to apply their skills to them, and form an understanding about how to best prepare themselves to find their way into these roles. This will be a rigorous class, one that will require a lot of time and dedication. Students will be selected via application prior to the first week of classes, to ensure that the class’s composition reflects a diverse range of skills, backgrounds, and proficiency levels.
Weylan Wang, Jennifer Kim, Eric McCormick, Lucas Liu
An introduction to 3D modeling with Autodesk Fusion 360 and 3D printing technology. Labs and projects will teach how to use 3D modeling software and how to design with printing in mind. Students will turn their ideas into real objects and get hands-on experience with 3D printers. Open to any students interested in 3D modeling and printing, no prior experience required.
Storm Lin, Ray Altenberg
This class is intended to offer a taste of how the hardware that is powering the information age really works. Electrical engineers must invest considerable effort to learn their science and math fundamentals. Eventually, though, the fun comes in building innovative and practical gadgets. We will side-step the science and math and get right into the hardware. We’ll take a look at what’s inside some of today’s most exciting products and technology as well as look ahead at the future products that are just around the corner. Our focus will be on hardware and we will see how much fun engineers can have using their hands other than by typing on a keyboard.
Jeffrey Bokor | 2 units
The course emphasizes elementary modeling, numerical methods and their implementation on physical problems motivated by real-world phenomena that students are likely to encounter in their careers, involving dynamics, controls, structural analysis, materials engineering, robotics, manufacturing, heat transfer, etc. The course will help students develop intuition about modeling physical systems and strengths and weaknesses of a variety of numerical methods, including: discretization of differential equations, recursion based methods for solving nonlinear systems, machine learning algorithms for optimization and statistics, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty quantification.
Tarek Zohdi | 3 units
Too often, enamored in our brilliant ideas, we skip the most important part: building products consumers will want and use. Precious time and effort are wasted on engineering perfect products only to launch to no users. This course teaches product management skills such as reducing risk while accelerating time to market, product life cycle and stakeholder management.
Kenneth Sandy | 3 units
This is a survey course focusing on product design. Through a combination of weekly activities, readings and hands-on projects, students will learn the processes and methods of product design, from framing through ideation to final concepts. Students will practice methods for design research, concept development, rapid prototyping and user testing. They will learn key methods of design innovation, learning how to uncover opportunities, explore ideas, prototype solutions, test concepts and interact with users. Students will do weekly project assignments aimed at illustrating the concepts discussed in class and readings. Students will also work in teams to plan, design, develop and test a product or service to the prototype stage.
Rachel Powers | 4 units
This course will explore theories and practices of “tangible user interfaces,” a novel approach to HCI that emphasizes physical interaction with computational media. Through a series of hands-on design challenges, engagement with historical and contemporary texts, and examination and analysis of recent works, students will build to a final production and demonstration of an innovative tangible user interface. Week-to-week, we will conduct user research, sketch and prototype digital and physical mock-ups, challenge and support each other through group critiques, evaluate existing experimental tangible user interfaces, consider user interfaces as enabling technologies, and develop new paradigms of tactile engagement. The course will have 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of laboratory per week.
Adam Hutz | 4 units
Bio-inspired design views the process of how we learn from Nature as an innovation strategy translating principles of function, performance and aesthetics from biology to human technology. The creative design process is driven by interdisciplinary exchange among engineering, biology, medicine, art, architecture and business. We will learn about the biomimicry design process from original scientific breakthroughs to entrepreneurial start-ups using case studies that include gecko-inspired adhesives, robots that run, fly and swim, artificial muscles, computer animation, medical devices and prosthetics while highlighting health, the environment, and safety.
Tia LaMore, Tamara Jafar
This course introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is conceived each year around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus, providing an introduction to the many art and design resources available to students on campus.
This fall we will focus on design and its connection to the arts across a range of disciplinary contexts. We will explore the role of design in imagining the built environment (architecture, city planning), in framing our experience of “new” media and technology, as well as design’s intersections with allied creative fields (theater, exhibition, public art, craft). Throughout, we will consider how design offers a toolkit for framing and approaching complex problems and how responsible design emerges through news forms of collaboration with a broad field of experts—including users, artists, engineers, scientists, and others. Moreover, we will consider how creative workers address key social issues through their practice. How, for instance, do data-driven systems for decision-making affect inclusivity and equality? How will artificial intelligence shape the future of work and the future of cultural life? How will designers and their collaborators work together to address issues of climate and sustainability? As today’s most pressing challenges cut across disciplinary boundaries, designers are articulating new methods for connecting the conceptual knowledge for asking, “Why?” with technical skills for asking, “How?”
Robert Kett, Bjoern Hartmann, & Kyle Steinfield | 3 Units
This graduate class surveys pattern-transfer techniques operating at the micrometer scale and below, as well as methods of handling nanoscale materials. We introduce the optical and mechanical principles underlying a spectrum of lithographic techniques, and show extensive examples of industrial applications. Class material also covers techniques for handling and assembling structures from zero-, one- and two-dimensional nanomaterials including nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires, and single- and few-atomic-layer sheets of van der Waals solids such as graphene and molybdenite. Applications in semiconductor manufacturing, optoelectronics, photonics, data storage, and surface engineering are considered. Students read journal papers in the field, write ‘peer reviews’ of these papers, and then discuss their reviews in class. The course culminates in a project in which students are invited to design and prototype a piece of apparatus for manipulating or characterizing material at the micrometer scale or below. There is an emphasis on extremely low-capital-cost, scalable techniques and apparatus designs, including ‘open source hardware’ that can be fabricated with widely available tools such as are found in the Jacobs Makerspace.
Hayden Taylor | 3 units
This 1-unit DeCal teaches technical skills important to the design of assistive technology. Students will be walked through the design process and taught technical skills (such as 3D modelling, 3D printing, laser cutting, Arduino, and electronics) through the perspective of assistive technology design.
The class will be held Thursdays 5-6:30pm consisting of a 1 hour lecture followed by 30 minutes of active work on a hands-on project. The class will culminate in a final project, designed to implement skills gained throughout the course. No prior experience or major is required for this course.
Camille Mercier, Vidur Maheshwari, Naser Abdelrahman
This course teaches the fundamentals of designing and building a combat robot. It will cover topics including computer aided design, prototyping, the mechanics of robotics, the knowledge of tool use and safety, and the engineering design process. This process takes into consideration materials, machining, construction limitations and cost. All of these topics are geared toward students interested in engineering principles and the application of the scientific process in a fun and engaging way that fosters community and practices problem solving.
Natalia Perez
This class introduces students to design techniques for mechatronics systems; provides guidelines to and experience with design of variety of sensors and actuators; provides experience in programming microcomputers and various IO devices; exposes students to the synthesis of mechanical power transfer components; develops an understanding of dynamics and kinematics in robotic systems; exposes students to design experiences in synthesis of feedback systems; provides experience in working in a team to design a prototype mechatronics device.
Hannah Stuart | 4 units
This class aims to introduce students to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), from a feedback controls perspective. In addition to the theoretical component, the class will have a substantial laboratory focus. Students will learn the theory necessary to model, understand, and design a controller for a UAV. Through the semesters, the students will implement a feedback controller on a UAV to allow it to hover, culminating in a competition at the end off the semester to compare performance.
Mark Mueller | 3 units
This course aims to introduce students to designing products that interface with the human body with the unique biomechanics in mind. 3D printing is used for rapid prototyping, testing, and customizing designs for a user or industry client. Throughout the semester, students will learn about tissue and body-level biomechanics. The learned knowledge will be applied in designing prototypes to solve problems provided by industry mentors.
Grace O’Connell | 4 units
A hands-on, studio design course where students work at the intersection of technological innovation and socially engaged art. Students will integrate a suite of digital fabrication tools with social design methods to create work that engages in cultural critique. Working with innovative technologies and radical, new art practices, this course will explore: hybrid art forms, critical design for community engagement, interventions in public spaces, tactical media and disobedient objects. These new making strategies will reframe our notions of people, places, and participation.
Jill Miller | 4 units
Throughout the Fung Fellowship program, a diverse cohort of undergraduate students participate in a cross-disciplinary, experience-based curriculum that integrates design thinking and an immersive community experience. Fellows work in teams to develop technology solutions to address the real-world public health challenges facing at-risk populations. This course provides a space for teamwork and project-based learning.
Jaspal Sandha & Jennifer Mangold | 3 units