Master of Design
The Master of Design degree of Carnegie Mellon culminates in a thesis project and paper.
My paper comes out of an interest in the methods and practice of teaching design. As for my project, I find surprising similarities between designing and playing.
My research has given me a deeper understanding about the profession of design... and a degree, which is awesome.
Thesis Project
PacePads: Enabling Play for Parents and Children
Advisor / John Zimmerman
When parents engage in free or undirected play with their children, they form stronger emotional bonds. However, social and contextual pressures often dissuade parents from playing with their child in unstructured ways. For my thesis project, I set about to explore this relationship of play and design ways to encourage play between parents and children.
The museum experience provides an intriguing context for investigating this play relationship. While most museums emphasize an educational experience, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh has specifically adopted a philosophy of play that is expressed in their exhibit designs and in their motto "Play with Real Stuff". Since this philosophy caters to a specific age group, the role of the parent and their effect on the child's experience are often considered secondary. However, parents have an undeniable effect on the play experience of their children. Instead of fun and cooperation, parent-and-child play turns into instruction and monitoring.
Design Principles
After expert interview and observational research, I arrived at four principles to carry forward in the design of a final solution.
1. Monitoring to Scaffolding / Allow for non-instructional play.
2. Necessary Cooperation / Utilize physical conditions
3. Appropriate Cooperation / Create a context through spontaneity.
4. Scalable Skills / Accommodate a sliding-scale for many participants.
Functional Prototype
Flash V9.0 Required
Following my research, I designed PacePads, an interactive platform that aims to engage self-organizing play between parents and children. By developing a functional prototype of PacePads, new insights have emerged from testing at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
Documentation
Thesis Paper
Claims of Knowledge in Design
Advisor / Dr. Suguru Ishizaki
The discipline of design, while a relatively young field in terms of academic scholarship, has gained a surprising amount of traction in many professional and academic communities. This growing attention to a design-oriented approach parallels the emergence of new fields of interest such as Experience Design, Service Design, and even Organizational Design. Pushing the boundaries of their arts and craft training, designers now assert the ability to address a broader set of design problems beyond their disciplinary tradition.
Underlying this transformation of professional practice is the recognition and promise of Design Thinking. This popular notion has been hailed as the integrative "design sensibility" that not only permeates all of design, but is also a competency that allows designers to approach a wide range of challenges. Yet, at the same time, the discourse around Design Thinking not only belies its complexity and history, but also overlooks many questions that concern the traditional disciplines of design. Simply put, the discussion revolves around what Design Thinking is rather than on how Design Thinking develops. If indeed designers have the ability to address complex challenges that lie outside of their traditional domains, what knowledge should designers possess? To understand what it means to think like a designer, one must first understand what is it that designers know.
In order to answer this question, this thesis examines previous studies on design epistemology—an area identified by Nigel Cross as one of the three topics of study necessary in establishing an "interdisciplinary discipline of design." I begin this thesis by reviewing the progress made towards understanding design knowledge and abilities since the design method movement in the last half of the 20th century. I then survey recent development in the models of design research to provide a perspective from the current conversation on disciplinary boundaries and purposes. Finally, I conclude this essay by proposing a framework that demystifies the notion of discipline-independent and discipline-specific design abilities.