This page lists Jacobs-affiliated courses taught during Fall 2022. To see Jacobs Hall course listings from other semesters, please visit our primary course listings page.
This course provides students with an introduction and hands-on engineering design experience on electric mobility. Transportation is the largest energy end-use sector at 37%. Over 95% of transportation energy is fossil fuel based. Consequently, decarbonizing transportation is a critical step toward climate change mitigation. Electric mobility describes concepts for utilizing electric power technologies for transportation, such as batteries and electric motors. This includes electric cars, micro-mobility, electric aircraft, electric ships, and more. The course is divided into three parts: First, we examine the economic, environmental and ethical principles behind transitioning combustion-based drivetrains to electric drivetrains. Second, we introduce the fundamental principles behind electric drivetrains, including electric machines and batteries. Third, students will disassemble an electric scooter, discover how it works, and then create an improved design.
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.
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.
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.
In this one unit P/NP course, students will attend the weekly Design Field Notes speaker series, which features local design practitioners who share real-world stories about their projects, practices, and perspectives. Talks are scheduled most weeks during the semester; during any off weeks, students will engage in facilitated discussions.
As today’s most pressing challenges cut across disciplinary boundaries, designers need to articulate new methods for connecting conceptual knowledge with technical skills and develop new ways of integrating ideas from various perspectives and world views. Each year students in this colloquium-style course explore a topic in design. Invited lecturers present a relevant project or challenge from their professional careers at a given intersection of critical contemporary issues expressed at a particular scale of design practice. Speakers share background material or readings in advance, allowing students to arrive with thoughtful questions and discussion points. Students compose written reflections throughout and following each speaker.
This course introduces foundational design and technology frameworks and builds skill sets essential to the design of products, services, and experiences enabled by emerging technologies. It follows a human-centered design process that includes research, concept generation, and prototyping, with an emphasis on iteration and refinement. It also develops fluency across a range of core technologies, from fabrication to micro-controllers, and how to operationalize them within a design context. These activities are supported by regular practice of design critique. Students engage with a highly technical semester-long project to create a product-service system leveraging both hardware and digital technologies that addresses a well-defined need.
Studio Foundations introduces MDes students to the key concepts of design studio and the foundational principles and methods that inform the ways designers work, collaborate, and practice. Students are introduced to the culture and life of a working studio – the intellectual heart of design practice, and the place where we engage, explore, and experiment. Since design is an iterative practice, this course models the development of ideas through feedback and response, critique and refinement, dialog and distillation. The studio engages a variety of materials and media, and seeks to uncover new approaches to making through emerging technology. As representation is a foundational capacity in design, this course initiates a considered practice of presenting and communicating design ideas – to this end we address skills in visual and verbal communication, and learn ways to document projects in order to begin building a portfolio of design work.
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 serves as the first in a two part sequence of courses (with DES INV 212) 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.
In this course you will participate in a hands-on design studio focused on key topics of concern related to design and technology innovation. The primary goal of this course is to orient students to fabrication, building technologies, and fundamental design production skills in a studio environment. A key secondary goal is to provide students the opportunity to address a real world problem and provide an application or solution. Themes and project topics, as well as subject matter expertise, are provided by either external partners, including companies, local governmental offices, or nonprofits, or provided by faculty and related to research interests.
In this culminating course for the MDes degree, you compile a portfolio of work that has been completed during the MDes program, selecting at least four meaningful pieces that demonstrate the achievement of key learning objectives and highlight the underlying themes of your course of study. Two projects should be deeper investigations of projects done in previous classes. The third project featured should be a deep dive into the project pursued in studio. The fourth entry of the portfolio should reflect on Design@Large, an experience you have had outside of an MDes course or studio where you have furthered your design knowledge and expertise within a broader context.
This required course for the Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering will include projects and case studies, many related to projects at UC Berkeley, such as those associated with the Development Impact Labs (DIL). Student teams will work with preliminary data to define the problem. They will then collect and analyze interview and survey data from potential users and begin to design a solution. Students will explore how to use novel monitoring technologies and “big data” for product improvement and evaluation. The student teams will use the case studies (with improvements based on user feedback and data analysis) to develop a plan for scaling and evaluation with a rigorous controlled trial.
Product Managers play an increasingly critical role in modern technology companies. They are charged with ensuring an organization is laser focused on creating valuable and highly usable products and services, to address pain-points and unmet-needs for their target customers. In this course, you will learn essential Product Management skills by putting theory into practice, on a product or idea of your choosing. You will learn techniques to accelerate product success and avoid common mistakes. You will work in a team comprising of students from engineering, design, business and other backgrounds. This will simulate real-world cross-functional environments where people with different skills collaborate to build a successful product.
The world is drowning in plastic that we’ve created, most of which takes hundreds of years to decompose. It is a disaster choking our oceans, poisoning our food chains and clogging our landfills. To solve this problem, we must find ways to replace or at least reduce plastic in manufacturing, to reuse, recycle or re-purpose plastic currently in use, to rescue discarded plastic from oceans or landfills, and to dispose of plastic responsibly.
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 conservation and biodiversity challenges facing our plant and animal species and their ecosystems. This course provides a space for teamwork, project-based learning, and working with industry & community partners.
Introduction to design and realization of mechatronics systems. Micro computer architectures. Basic computer IO devices. Embedded microprocessor systems and control, IO programming such as analogue to digital converters, PWM, serial and parallel outputs. Electrical components such as power supplies, operational amplifiers, transformers and filters. Shielding and grounding. Design of electric, hydraulic and pneumatic actuators. Design of sensors. Design of power transmission systems. Kinematics and dynamics of robotics devices. Basic feedback design to create robustness and performance.
This course introduces students to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The course will cover modeling and dynamics of aerial vehicles, and common control strategies. Laboratory exercises allow students to apply knowledge on a real system, by programming a microcontroller to control a UAV.
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.
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.