---
title: Design Studio 01
page_type: course
track: Application
course_type: Course
feature_img: /assets/images/2023-24/year-1/t-1/design-studio-01.jpeg
img_caption: Design Dialogues, 2022, Barcelona
faculty:
    - guillem-camprodon
    - tomas-diez
    - jana-tothill
    - roger-guilemany
ects: 12
---

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## Syllabus

MDEF Research, Design and Development studios aim to take research areas of interest and initial project ideas into an advanced concretion point, and execution plan. The studio structure in three terms could be understood as follows:

**TERM 1 Research**: Understanding what it means to design for emergent futures. Analyzing the past and finding weak signals. References, state of the art. Identifying areas of interest. Experimenting from the first-person perspective.

**TERM 2 Design**: Forming the present through interventions in the real world. Building the foundations of your design space, forming strategic partnerships. Applying knowledge into practice through iterative prototyping. Testing ideas and prototypes in the real world.

**TERM 3 Development**: Refining interventions and identifying desirable futures. Establishing roadmaps for the construction of emergent narratives.. Communicating and disseminating your project through speculative design.

![](/assets/images/2023-24/year-1/t-1/design-studio-01-6-design-strategies.png)

<p class="image-caption">Fab Lab Barcelona (IAAC) & Fab City Foundation</p>

The first term Design Studio aims to create a solid ground for the students to start developing their projects. Weekly activities will be set to interlink results from the courses like their mappings, cartographies, experiments, 1st person design activities, prototypes, with their personal development plan. In order to propose an area of intervention at the end of the trimester. The Design Studio activities will consist of presentations, group activities, short exercises and personal coaching.

**Keywords: Prototyping, 1st Person Research through Design, Design Space, Documentation and Communication, Design Interventions**

### Learning Objectives

The specific goals are the following:

1. To develop a critical position in the student’s design practice.
2. Define possible areas of intervention, based on the Atlas of the Week Signals.
3. Prototype an alpha version of the design space and iterate.
4. To build personal and collective repositories of resources.


## Schedule

=== "03/10"

    **Landing Kick off - What's your purpose**

     **Goals**: This session will be part of the landing week activities. A reflection of where each of us is now and where we would like to be by the end of the program, "The old me and my new me".

=== "09/10"

    **Roles of Prototyping in 1PP Research through Design**

    **Goals**: To learn about the different roles of prototyping in design research. Being resilient and resourceful as a professional. Learn about 1PP RTD iterative design interventions methodology.

    **Activity 1**: From the different roles that prototypes play in design research, reflect which ones you have used in the past and which ones you could include in your practice.

    **Activity 2**: Bring a random scrap material from home. Use the material to sketch a prototype of another colleague's inquiry.

    **Deliverable**: Write a post on your website describing your own RtD toolbox based on your vision and identity. Select the main roles of prototyping and other design activities that you want to use based on the context you are in.

    **Schedule**: Each session will start with a 15-minute check-in round and end with a 45-minute collective reflection space to share experiences and identify collaborative goals.

=== "16/10"

    :fontawesome-solid-bolt-lightning: **Design Studio Reviews**

=== "23/10"

    **Areas of interventions in a Multiscalar Design Space. Collaborative design spaces and interventions.**

    **Goals**: To explore and develop forms of aggregative documentation, building collective design spaces.

    **Activity**: Develop a collective framework to document explorations using the existing digital platforms, build digital maps of resources and opportunities in the design studio.

    **Deliverable 1**: A collaborative map of projects, resources, news, and opportunities for interventions that can populate your physical working space and a plan on how to share relevant information between all of you on-line.

    **Deliverable 2**: Carry out different pilot design interventions to understand in an embodied and situated way your design space.

    **Schedule**: Each session will start with a 15-minute check-in round and end with a 45-minute collective reflection space to share experiences and identify collaborative goals.

=== "30/10"

    :fontawesome-solid-bolt-lightning: **Design Studio Reviews**

=== "06/11"

    **Personal narratives, collective storytelling. Forms of 1PP Documentation and Communication.**

    **Goals**: Learn new ways of documenting and communicating. Integrate documentation and communication as part of your daily activities.

    **Activity**: Reflect on how you are documenting and communicating your process within the courses and the project.

    **Deliverable 1**: Choose 1 or more roles and formats from the list that was collectively created in class and put them into practice. Write a post with a reflection on the communication strategy that you are devising for the next stages of your project.

    **Schedule**: Each session will start with a 15-minute check-in round and end with a 45-minute collective reflection space to share experiences and identify collaborative goals.

=== "13/11"

    :fontawesome-solid-bolt-lightning: **Design Studio Reviews**

=== "20/11"

    **Collective design intervention: a collective design action with humans and/or non-humans.**

    **Goals**: Situate your collective explorations in context to frame to update your collective design space.

    **Activity**: Plan your collective design intervention and map the actors and infrastructure you want to involve.

    **Task**: Execute your first collective design intervention for the next design studio.

    **Deliverable**: Document the collective design intervention, analyze it and reflect on the findings.

    **Schedule**: Each session will start with a 15-minute check-in round and end with a 45-minute collective reflection space to share experiences and identify collaborative goals.

=== "27/11"

    :fontawesome-solid-bolt-lightning: **Design Studio Reviews (group)**

=== "04/12"

    **Design Dialogues Preparation**

    **Goals**: Create a collective and individual building up plan for the Design Dialogues exhibition.

    **Activity**: Group dynamic to create themes and groups of projects for the exhibition.

    **Deliverable 1**: Planning of the exhibition, space allocation and special needs.

    **Deliverable 2**: Work on the design dialogues deliverables.

=== "11/12"

    :fontawesome-solid-bolt-lightning: **Design Studio Reviews**

=== "19/12"

    **Design Dialogues**

    **Objectives**: To present collective areas of intervention and to present the first experiments at a personal and collective level, and in an immediate context. To produce the first group exhibition of the master’s projects.

    **Deliverables**: A series of prototypes presented in a collective design space and a personal video of no more than 3 minutes (answering the question what is your updated purpose).

## Deliverables

**Deliverables for after the holidays (Submission deadline, January 7th)**

- **5 high resolution images** of the **highlights of your Design Studio work** during the term
- **1 high resolution image** of your **personal and collective design space**
- **A written document** (TBD)

**These are the points we are going to look at for Term 1:**

- Relevance of the project in relation to the weak signals
- Framing of the opportunity through the Collective Design Space
- Involvement of the community through the collective interventions

## Grading Method

| Percentage  | Description                                     |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------            |
| 50%         | Faculty (including written assignment)          |
| 50%         | Self-Evaluation                                 |

!!! ects "European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)"

    {{ ects }} ECTS

## Additional Resources

[Desjardins, A., Tomico, O., Lucero, A., Cecchinato, M. E., & Neustaedter, C. (2021). Introduction to the special issue on first-person methods in HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 28(6), 1-12.](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3492342)

## Faculty

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