This page lists Jacobs-affiliated courses taught during Fall 2025. To see Jacobs Hall course listings from other semesters, please visit our primary course listings page.
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.
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.
This course exposes students to the mindset, skillset and toolset associated with design, and interweaves practical design methods with readings and lectures on the history of design and technology.
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.
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.
An introduction to manufacturing process technologies and the ways in which dimensional requirements for manufactured objects are precisely communicated, especially through graphical means. Fundamentals of cutting, casting, molding, additive manufacturing, and joining processes are introduced. Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), tolerance analysis for fabrication, concepts of process variability, and metrology techniques are introduced and practiced. 3-D visualization skills for engineering design are developed via sketching and presentation of 3-D geometries with 2-D engineering drawings. Computer-aided design software is used. Teamwork and effective communication are emphasized through lab activities and a design project.
Recent developments in creative technologies (such as augmented/virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs) have allowed artists to experiment in their studios in novel ways. How do we tell stories, question the status quo, envision alternative futures, or push boundaries using new programs, forms, or spatial understandings? How can new mediums inform the way we understand and produce works of art? How do we critically engage, subvert, and challenge the commercial industry model of new media production?
By utilizing research and experimentation with new tools and software programs, we will consider art making in relation to other more traditional media. This is not a technology class with a dash of art on the side. In this class, developing your artistic voice will be just as important as honing your technical skills. We will have a historical approach and we will look at new media art in an ongoing dialogue with sculpture, installation, film, video, sound art, and performance art. Students will be introduced to contemporary art projects by artists working in socially engaged forms, raising awareness and creating opportunities for conversation about our political and ecological realities.
While it is not necessary to have proficiency in specific software programs before taking this course, having some familiarity with creative tools is beneficial. Merging new and traditional mediums will be encouraged. Assignments include: using artificial intelligence programs to iterate on collaborative drawings, using Adobe Illustrator and a laser cutter to design and install an art intervention, and exploring spatial immersion and critical worldbuilding using virtual reality.
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.