As part of virtual micro courses that will be taking place throughout the semester, Carnegie Mellon faculty will be giving virtual lectures open to the CMU-Q community. Peter Scupelli, Associate Professor, Design at Carnegie Mellon University will be speaking on, “Teaching to Dexign Futures: A vision for a blended learning pedagogy to be deployed at scale”. 

Abstract: 

Change is exponential in the 21st century. Products and services are developed faster, have shorter lifecycles, and exist in the wider context with global challenges such as climate change and sustainability. Design for the 21st century requires new skills; design educators are challenged to adapt quickly. Many design educators are concerned with urgent problems such as sustainable development and climate change. In this talk, I describe Dexign Futures, a course that teaches students how to align short-term design to long-term timescales. We leverage Future Studies researchers’ work on how to teach students greater agency with in long-term timescale horizons. We describe an effective and efficient blended learning design pedagogy (e.g., combining online and face-to-face learning activities) to engage with new global challenges such as climate change and sustainability. (Dexign) Futures, is a required design studies course for all third-year undergraduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The term “dexign,” refers to an experimental form of design that combines design thinking with futures thinking.