About
This undergraduate IDeATe design course focuses on teaching a basic visual design process from start to finish. You will work individually and in teams to gain proficiency in applying specific design methods to information design challenges at each stage of the design process.In IDeATe Information Design you will: perform exercises and activities to practice what you learn, attend to lectures to gain new information/perspectives, engage in projects to learn through making, conduct readings to balance theory and practice, participate in critiques to verbalize your views and consider alternate perspectives, join in discussions to develop shared understanding, give presentations to communicate your thinking, complete tutorials and learn software for additional insight. These activities will lead to you being able to: describe the importance of context and audience to design decisions to set the stage for creating work that addresses the people that it serves, frame a problem to be solved to identify challenges that require design improvements, synthesize information collected in project framing to establish a logical direction for your design approach, ideate a range of concepts to consider various ways of addressing the task at hand, iterate select concepts through low to high fidelity prototyping to determine which concepts hold the most merit, visualize your ideas to communicate concepts clearly and aid learning and understanding of information, evaluate concepts in progress to identify areas that could use improvement, present and argue design solutions to strengthen the description and validation of your work.
Spring 2015 instructor: Michael Mages
