MAPD5000 Technology and Design Emneplan

Technologies play a distinctive role in everyday lives. Human - technology relations are complex as they combine usability with the creation of new practices on an individual, organizational and societal level. The process of introduction of new technologies is not necessarily linear starting with scientific invention and design conception to the reception of a particular product by the market. This iterative process is characterized by ethical, sustainability, and material engineering issues, but above all, by the imprint on human behavior in the way that technologies augment or prohibit human actions. This course explores complexity in human/technology relations and how design can be strategically used to merge the above mentioned factors for commercialization of emerging technologies.

Admission to the Master's program.

This course introduces systems thinking as part of the design profession. Systems thinking is defined as a key competency by UNESCO to achieve sustainable development (2018). In Visualizing Complexity, you will study and work with several methods and approaches that combines systems theory and design. Using these approaches, will make it possible for you to understand and work with and within complex settings. Complexity in this setting relates to factors such as products, production, sharing, and services and dimensions such as social/political, environment, economy, management, organization change and development, planning, strategy, and technology in which the designer, as well as products and services that they create, will perform and influence.

Visualizing is a major activity in this course. All studies, readings, observations, interviews, data analysis, user journeys, development, and design, will be visualized in real-time or after the activity is performed. This, to realize, understand, and describe relations, synthesize and categorize the data that is present to all project participants during the whole project. Systemic design methods thus facilitate cooperation and co-creation. The approach of GIGA-mapping, which builds on cooperation among students and clients, with lay-people, professionals, stakeholders, and researchers from other disciplines (intra- and inter disciplinary), is therefore central in this course. GIGA-mapping involves the visualization of data to accumulate, communicate, and analyze to understand and create products and services within complex strategic systems and structures. Therefore GIGA-mapping is widely used as a workshop method to generate data and understand and handle them with the partakers in the project.

The introduced systems theory will be part of the systemic design and GIGA-mapping process by the analysis through for example describing feedback loops, relations, input and output dynamics, systems, systems coding, buffers, delay, emergence, closed and open communications, and collective communication and information.

• Reading and workshops connecting design, innovation, research and technology
• Using design sprints to run cross-disciplinary teams
• Discussions concerning ethical situations that emerge by the application of technologies as part of design through participatory processes, postphenomenology, speculative design, actor network theory
• Engagement and user experience facilitated by technology products and services

Admission to the Master's programme.

None.

The evaluation is based on two parts, each contributing 50 % of the final grade:

1) Written assignment: As part of the turn in, the students student will turn in text individually or in groups, that discusses ethical views about design and technology for health

2) Group work presentations of self-initiated work based on the curriculum

Both examination 1. and 2. must be passed in the same semester in order to pass the course

Part 1) The exam result can be appealed.

Part 2) The exam result cannot be appealed.

The most important teaching and learning methods for this course are: workshops, group work, lectures, discussions (conversation theory based), studio courses and tutoring

The following required coursework must be approved before the student can take the exam:

• One note of reflection. Maximum 1000 words.
• One workshop
• workshop documentation

Part 1) One internal examiner.

Part 2) Two internal examiners. External examiners are used regurlarly.