We hope that you are interested in this work and might consider adapting it for use in your design teaching. Each iteration of the seminar had modifications that were based on what we learned from the previous iteration. The next time we teach the seminar, it will be no different, as we learned some important things when we taught the seminar in 2022. Some of the changes that we will consider making the next time we teach the seminar are here:

Consider a different order of the final half of the seminar

In the winter 2022 iteration, the “Good designers do x” lens was presented in week 8, the final lens before learners did their ideal design signature. The placement as the final lens was due to the history of pulling the seminar together. Early in the quarter, Cindy decided it was important to present students with research from other scholars in the field, resulting in her sending out a query to colleagues in the engineering design education and the design research communities to respond to the prompt, "When you talk to someone and say “Good designers do ‘X’”, what are the top things you list?" In the span of four weeks we heard back from 27 colleagues and the responses were absolutely inspirational! People included concepts that were broad and deep and very reflective. The students resonated massively with the list and it was very inspirational for their postcards, which you will see in week 8 in the materials on this website. 

As we currently work on developing a workshop with this material, we have come to realize that in presenting the three lenses -- good designers do x, the many models of design, and Cindy's design expertise research -- it is better to first introduce "good designers to x" so participants start with a broader notion of design. This is the order we would implement in the next version of the seminar.

Consider changing the name of the final assessment from “ideal design signature”

It can be intimidating to think about what you would do in an ideal situation, and the concept of an “ideal” design signature for a final assignment was a bit challenging for some students. For example, some students mentioned that the phrase “ideal” felt too set in stone or final and were more comfortable with the idea that their design signature would continue to evolve overtime.  They had a good point, because as we discuss in the seminar, design signatures can vary for different attributes of design projects. What would an ideal design signature be that could cover all the cases? The intent of the assignment is to get people to reflect on who they want to be as designers and create a memory aid for themselves so that those concepts will arise in the future when they're in the midst of doing design. Therefore, we have thought about renaming the final assignment. Some of the options are: aspirational design signature, future design signature, design signature memory aid, potential design signature, ongoing design signature.

We hope that you take the bits and pieces of this work that may be inspiring for you and adapt them to whatever situation you are teaching in. We would love to hear how it goes for you!

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Here are some notes about the history of developing the seminar and the things we are thinking about changing for our next iteration. 

 The current version of the learning materials comes from the Winter quarter 2022. This was the fourth iteration of the seminar. The original seminar was developed by Cindy and Kathryn Shroyer in the winter of 2020. We started the seminar sitting around a table with each other and passing around physical postcards. It was wonderful to interact physically with each other's postcards. However, since Seattle was the first place the pandemic hit in the United States, we ended up having the last two sessions on zoom in the midst of tremendous uncertainty.  We then pivoted to give the seminar fully online in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic was raging. All of us in that iteration of the seminar felt deeply grateful to spend time deeply reflecting with each other on design processes in the chaos of the spring of 2020.  In the fall of 2020 Khadijah Jordan joined the Dear Design team and along with Kathryn and Cindy delivered another fully online version. In this iteration we were more consistent across the slide decks and were able to have a more coherent message about design awareness and design signatures.

In the winter quarter of 2022, we took the materials from 2020, and adapted them for the fourth iteration of the seminar.  These are the materials that you find here. We ran two sections of the seminar, with Yuliana and Grace each leading one of the sections. There's always a significant amount of work to adapt someone else's curriculum to your own teaching situation, and Yuliana is leading the work on an analysis to describe that work for these materials.  The final set of slides that you see here, and the scripts that go along with the slides is the result of that adaptation work. In this version we have more developed in-session exercises, a slide set and message that moves more coherently towards the final assignment, and scripts for some of the slide sets.