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“Vital Signs” is the online publication of the MA Design Research class of 2016. Drawing from the students’ multimedia thesis portfolios, these written and audio narratives reflect yearlong quests into a broad array of design topics. The name Vital Signs nods to the immediacy and the relevance of these investigations as well as the “messy vitality”— in the words of architect and writer Robert Venturi— of the research and writing process.
“Design thinking” emerged in the workplace as a management practice, intended to codify and package designers’ way of thinking and doing into a step-by-step approach. The term tapped into executive, mid-management, and entrepreneurial anxieties about perpetually being innovative. But as companies adopt the fun and fast approach to innovation, a new myth about design is […]
The rooms we live in are sites where status, ideology, and anxiety surface materially: they are, in a sense, portraits of us. From this point of view, rooms inhabited by children are doubly fraught, reflecting not only clues to the identity of the child but the viewpoints of parents as well. Through their purchase or […]
Successful experience designers, self-identified or not, tend to employ similar strategies, especially when it comes to opening people up to risk in a caring way. This research will inform a lexicon for designing experiences, with a specific focus on experiences that aim for human enrichment. Drawing from game studies, positive psychology, and the anthropology of […]