Still looking for courses for this fall? The Jacobs Institute is excited to share two recently-added design courses–read more and register now!
Celebrated user experience design and Cooper co-founder Alan Cooper and YouTube senior user experience researcher Renato Verdugo are coming back to campus to re-teach their course DES INV 190-9: Thinking Like a Good Ancestor: Finding Meaning in the Technology We Build.
Purin Phanichphant will be leading DES INV 190-1 Reimagining Mobility, with support from two designers at Ford Motor Company’s Greenfield Labs.
In addition to these newly listed courses, DES INV 190E-2 Upper-Limb Prosthesis Design is still accepting applications.
Full course details and information on enrolling are below.
Alan Cooper | 2 units | Fridays 1-3pm
About the course
This two-unit course explores how novel design practices can be deployed and leveraged within the existing cultures of many technology companies and startups. Designs techniques to look beyond the immediate will be explored, studied, and operationalized. This course addresses long-term effects of design decisions and offers strategies for exposing long-term pitfalls, problems, and negative effects. The goal is to develop proficiency within existing design practices to enable a long-range design framing that will result in broader, more sustainable technological and societal impacts while avoiding quick near-term solutions that have detrimental long-term consequences. The ethical issues of balance and tradeoff between these real design challenges will be confronted and operationalized through class activities and interrogations.
Through the new concept of Ancestry Thinking, this course will propose ideas to broaden our understanding of the technological ecosystem we live in. Throughout the semester students will discuss ways to internalize what would otherwise remain as externalities or byproducts of technological and design developments. Our goal is to enable future technology practitioners to build holistic narratives around their resulting final designs and within their design practice.
Please note that the course does not count toward the Berkeley Certificate for Design Innovation.
About the instructor
Alan Cooper is widely known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design. Alan is the author of the books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (editions 1-4) and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As co-founder of interaction design consultancy Cooper, he created the goal-directed design methodology and invented personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products that delight users’ sensibilities. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic,” he is a Computer History Museum Fellow and received the first of only seven Windows Pioneer awards from Bill Gates.
Enrollment and prerequisites
Advanced undergraduate students and master’s students can enroll directly in this course via CalCentral. Students should have prior knowledge of design thinking/practice. The course can be taken either for a grade or on a Pass/No Pass basis.
Purin Phanichphant | 3 units | Tuesday/Thursday, 3pm-4:30pm
About the course
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.
This course satisfies the Advanced Design requirement for the Berkeley Certificate for Design Innovation. Want to take a look at the course experience? Read about projects that emerged from a past offering of Reimagining Mobility.
Enrollment instructions
Enrollment is by application; apply to join the course here. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Hannah Stuart | 4 units | Monday/Wednesday 12:30-2pm lecture and Friday 1-4pm lab
About the course
This course provides hands-on experience in designing prostheses and assistive technologies using user-centered design. Students will develop a fundamental understanding of the state-of-the-art, design processes and product realization. Teams will prototype a novel non-invasive solution to a disabilities-related challenge, focusing on upper-limb mobility or dexterity. Lessons will cover biomechanics of manipulation, tactile sensing and haptics, actuation and mechanism robustness, and control interfaces. Readings will be selected from academic journals and course notes. Guest speakers will be invited to address cutting edge breakthroughs relevant to assistive tech.
This course includes sufficient treatment of engineering principles that it may be used to fulfill College of Engineering undergraduate unit requirements. The course also satisfies the Advanced Design requirement for the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation.
Enrollment and prerequisites
This course is targeted at upper division undergraduates, Master’s, and PhD students. Students from a diverse set of technical backgrounds are encouraged, but should have some type of engineering experience.
Enrollment in DES INV 190E-2 is by application; applications will be reviewed by the instructors on a rolling basis. Mechanical Engineering students should enroll/waitlist in the ME 193C or ME 292C listings of the course, rather than the DES INV listing.