Design Across Scales

This project proposes to create an undergraduate-level course that will allow students across all schools and majors collectively to understand, explore and contribute to the significant design challenges of our time. Design education is evolving to acknowledge the transformed status of design itself. The scope of design has expanded to include a broad range of scales and disciplines, shifting from the production of objects to the design of experiences, services and larger social frameworks. Designers are no longer exclusively committed to design autonomous objects (buildings, cars, furniture and household products, medical devices), but rather are conceiving and testing whole ecologies of design experiences (robotic construction systems, transportation systems, health care experiences, water distribution, and clean energy). The scope of design ecologies is so broad and so integrated with other disciplines that traditionally trained designers are ill equipped to tackle the new breadth of design tasks at hand. Designers must collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to design the experiences, environments and implementation strategies for realizing design in today's increasingly complex world.