Taught By:
RJ Millhouse
Assistant Professor
Landscape Architecture, Environmental Design, Urban Design; Interior Architecture
The Design School
Arizona State University
Read profile here.
Course Description:
This course introduces you to design thinking—a concept and practice that requires you to think differently about design and the world around us to achieve real innovation. Design Thinking provides you with a slate of scholarship, design projects, and sets of tools to approach complex design challenges we are facing today, including climate change, spatial marginalization, environmental racism, uneven development, and more. As Teun den Dekker (2021) says, design thinking is a toolbox (119), a way of thinking (17), working (47), approaching (81) design challenges. Dekker (2021) goes on to say that design thinking urges designers to adopt six attitudes: thinking flexibly, work integrally, empathize, cooperate, imagine, and experiment. Therefore, this course will challenge you to design from the margins. You will learn fundamental design elements; explore histories and legacies of urban policies and practices; investigate the impact of urbanization on marginalized people, and use design thinking to disrupt traditional urban and environmental design tendencies that re/produce social harms for users. The materials in this class offer several new techniques of design thinking and creative problem solving through lectures, media, discussion boards, and a final project.
