我是驻院行政总裁艾米丽·伊格尔’06 is making a difference to the lives of students inside the classroom. Her experience as a design practitioner in the tech world brings a perspective to the MG官方电子平台 curriculum that students don’t always find otherwise.
我是驻院行政总裁艾米丽·伊格尔 教视觉研究主题课程吗, 以人为本的设计思维, that brings students into the many frameworks and processes employed by designers and their collaborators to design products and experiences that serve human users.
The course has 17 students enrolled, coming from many areas of the college. Emily stresses that human centered design is inherently interdisciplinary and draws on many disciplines. Some students are majoring in things that an outsider might expect to align with design thinking, 就像 数据科学 & 分析 or 工作室艺术, and some students are majoring in less expected areas, 就像 日本语言文化, 心理学, or 经济学 & 业务. Some students, still exploring what Beloit has to offer, remain undecided. Emily has welcomed them all and the perspectives they bring to the class.
“A designer need not be an “artist”,” says Emily. “Design thinking practices, I believe, can help everyone learn and work together better.”
The class works with various 太ls that designers use in the field, from high-tech online interfaces to simple processes 就像 post-it notes to service design diagrams. 经历这一切, Emily asks students to shift their perspectives to think of the varied humans who are the users. 在最近的一次课堂作业中, students were challenged to consider the elements of good design by creating proposals for the “worst designed” products they could imagine. Submissions included a water fountain that required the user to put on a seatbelt in order to drink (from Mason Sorensen’25) and an electric kettle with a very tiny hole and a spout that turned around on itself making it difficult to get water in or out (from Yaksh Ujoodha’25). Students reviewed each other’s designs and voted with colorful stickers to find winners for several categories of “bad design” following a workshop method called “dot-voting” or “dot-mocracy.”
Ojaswi Dhakal’25 loves that the course emphasizes the importance of design. 在这堂课之前, I thought design was limited to certain domains such as fashion and art,”她说。. “Little did I think about how broad design is and how anything and everything is a design.”
No stranger to collaboration in the workplace, Emily is also working closely with 艺术教授乔治·威廉姆斯, who is teaching a User Experience Design course this semester. “User experience design is a job that requires collaboration, and that’s true in Emily’s Human Centered Design Class, 太,乔治说。. “Students get practice collaborating in her course, in a workshop environment. 这对学生来说是一次很好的经历.”
除了她教的课, Emily has been contributing her skills to other courses as well. One such course is an upper level writing course that focuses on data analysis and communications, 写、数、看, 教 Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures Daniel Youd. 在课程中, 学生学习以新颖的方式分析文本, approaching books as datasets that can be studied with analytical and technical 太ls. 作为这门课的客座演讲者, Emily Eagle led interactive sessions to have students consider how cultural expectations play into large language models, and how our own assumptions color the investigations we undertake.
Ali Hasnain ’25 recently described the 以人为本的设计思维 course and its methods as “the most liberal arts class possible” because it combines so many elements and really encourages students to participate. “It’s more 就像 being in a meeting or a workshop than in a class.” Emily hopes that the exposure to these different frameworks will help the students consider their future impacts and careers from a human-centered perspective, whether or not they ever hold the title “designer.”
2023年10月10日
