Category: Course

Design transforms our current world into a preferred state. Conclusions about what such preferred states are, requires in depth knowledge about ethics, economics and technology. But since these preferred states are situated in the future, they always include a certain amount of speculation.

Science Fiction books and films speculate about possible futures and technological developments. This genre has a rich history of ideas and stories. They often reflect the current trends in our society. The original Star Trek TV series, for example, reflected the cold war. The united earth symbolized America, whereas the Klingons represented the USSR.

Understanding the social and cultural dimensions of Science Fiction, enables the students to make better choices in their designs. Designers are at the pivot point of creating brave new worlds and they require knowledge about what visions of the future exist to be able to avoid a 1984. Continue reading “Visions of the future”

Design research can be done during any phase of the design process. It requires a specific way of thinking to reason from your design question to conclusions relevant for your design process. Many different research approaches can be applied during a design process. However, the global manner of setting up a study is usually very similar.

This assignment will teach students to go through this process by providing underlying theories and showing how this can be applied to a real design research study. The assignment will be taught by 1 assignor from each of the four design research groups of the faculty to show the diversity of design research approaches. Continue reading “Introduction To Design Research”

The goal of this master class is to create expansion packs for the Lego Mindstorms NXT product. The student follow a series of lectures on the underlying technologies and in the end design and build their extension pack. Continue reading “Results – Lego Beyond Toys 2”

Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science offers an interesting view on the phenomenon of complexity. In his book it is demonstrated how systems based on very simple rules can generate complex patterns that appear random in many ways. We will make a tour trough his examples, try to understand his claims and do some experiments ourselves.

We will deepen our understanding of complexity and ways to exploit it or master it. This module is not a substitution for the classical mathematical skills of symbolic manipulation in algebra and calculus. However, we shall use the computer-math tool Mathematica, which is a very powerful tool for all kinds of math, not only the cellular automata of Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”. Continue reading “The Golden Ratio Course”