Design and Society

This course will introduce students to design practices that stand self-consciously outside the mainstream of consumer driven design and which instead seek to employ socially and environmentally responsible practices that foreground the needs of marginalised groups and challenge existing power structures. Through a set of themed lectures that encompass and connect the personal with the social, the local to the global, and the artificial with the natural, students will explore the ways in which designers have responded to these themes and will critically engage with the strategies they have adopted. Running through this, particular attention will be paid to the relationship between designers and the people they design for (or with). It will ask, how are people or communities conceived and framed, what knowledge structures underpin this, what is the relationship between human and non-human, the natural and artificial, and how can design work to disrupt and reconfigure these relations to create more emancipatory and sustainable futures? The course will encourage students to develop their own research interests arising from these themes and where relevant it will also support them to approach their own design practices in a reflexive and critically informed manner. The course is delivered through weekly lectures and seminars. Each week students will be required to undertake research activities and prepare work, as part of their directed learning hours, for presentation or discussion in seminar and in preparation for the final submission.

Credit Level: 8

Year taken: Year 2 Undergraduate 

SCQF Credits: 20