Details

House Rules

We're all adults here, let's act like it. Put your phones and laptops down unless we're using them for something in class.

Attendance

KU Design has rules about attendance and we'll follow them. We're all working together here so it's important that you actually show up. Don't be late, it's rude to everybody. This is a studio course, which means we're learning by doing, and experiencing that all together. We've got a fairly small group, so this should be pretty manageable.

Assignments

The canonical list of assignments and due dates is on the course schedule.

Teach an Old Person

Once per week, I'll ask one person to tell me something they think an old person doesn't know. You'll need to have this prepared in advance, so figure out your thing now.

Take a couple of minutes and explain something to me that you think I - a 40-something white dude, married, kids, full-time job, mortgage, etc - doesn't know or understand. A niche subculture on tiktok? Some new-ish piece of slang? Some kind of technology? Music? Art? You don't need to prepare anything besides your idea, just have something ready when you walk in the door. You'll need to do this about twice per semester.

Consider this an exercise in designing for an audience. You'll get better at this as we go.

AI stuff

Here's my policy on AI tools: you should absolutely be using them. Use it, love it, and TELL us about it. I WANT you to use any AI tool you can find, but the tradeoff is that you must disclose and demonstrate for us. Show and tell, please. There are tools available now that weren't three months ago, and new stuff will come out while we work together this semester. Please use any kind of generative AI tool you want, just show us how you did it and don't pretend that you did something yourself when you didn't. Help us all learn to work with new tech!

Laptop Open, Laptop Closed

I'll tell you which one we're in. When we're critiquing, laptops go down. When we're building, they're open.

Critique

A lot of this class is showing unfinished work to other people and listening to what they say about it. This can be uncomfortable and so is telling your studiomates when their work isn't good enough yet. That's OK, it's what your studiomates are here for! But your job is to be helpful to others, and receive their help too.

Getting stuck

You will get stuck. That's OK. Finding out how to work with new and unfamiliar technology is what we're doing here. But we're going to practice pretending we are competent, and build some muscle of how we get unstuck. Our big projects will require a log of this!

Across evertyhing, I'm looking for:

• Does it work? Not "is it impressive" neccessarily, but does the thing you built do the thing you said it does?
• Did you work with real people? Real UX is when real users experience things.
• Did you show your progress? You'll document the journey of each project. We'll see commit histories, test notes, logs.
• Craft. Does it look great? Did you apply your traditional visual design toolkit? Layout, hierarchy, type, restraint. You're seniors.
• Did you talk about it well? Presenting your work is part of designing, in this class and in every job you'll ever have.