Graduate

Upon completion of this specialization, students should be able to:

• Use human-centered design principles to guide the design of tools, artifacts, services, and other resources.
• Use appropriate observation approaches relevant to one’s home discipline (e.g., ethnography, surveys, interviews, etc.) to gain insights into the needs, contextual requirements, and insights of various stakeholders.
• Use appropriate design processes and protocols, including user-experience, interaction, speculative, participatory, collaborative, or community-driven design.
• Collaborate in multidisciplinary teams and communicate effectively with individuals who have diverse training, perspectives, and beliefs.
• Use iteration as a process to clarify and refine understanding of stakeholders, their needs, problems, and potential solutions.
• Develop self-awareness of one's own and others' power and privilege, and identify appropriate ethical responses when acting as a designer.

The specialization requires four courses (16 credits) plus Design@Large (1 credit) for a total of 17 credits.

This class exposes students to the complexities of engaging in design within sociotechnical systems, requiring them to account for social, behavioral, technological, and ecological factors. Designers must develop interconnected knowledge, skills, and practices to handle ethical and political quandaries, power and privilege differentials, human behaviors, technical feasibility, and natural systems. The class seeks to offer two key perspectives, compassionate critique and systems thinking, as foundational bases with which to engage as a designer in complex sociotechnical systems.

Design@Large is a weekly seminar sponsored by the Design Lab that invites experts in design to discuss their work. Students are introduced to a broad range of applications and approaches, with an opportunity to engage with industry professionals. The cross-listed courses CSE 219 and COGS 229 will also satisfy the requirement for DSGN 219.

Students are required to take three of the elective courses listed below. Two of these must be from the student’s home department. The third can be any course on the list of approved courses, with a recommendation that the third course is chosen from outside of the home department. One course must satisfy the Power, Privilege, and Ethical Response requirement (approved courses are marked with an asterisk in the list below.)

Note: If you are a student or faculty member who thinks a course should be included, please send a request to the specialization director, Elizabeth Eikey, at eeikey@ucsd.edu.

All students will be required to take at least one course that provides instruction and learning opportunities related to understanding issues of power, privilege, equity, marginalization, and ethical responses to these issues.