Author: scupelli

Georgia Tech Invited Lecture

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March 11, 2019 3:22 PM

Peter Scupelli gave a talk titled “Teaching to Future – Tradeoffs Between Flipped Classroom and Design Course Pedagogies.” at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing.

In the 21st century, change is exponential. Products and services are designed and developed faster, and their shelf-life disrupted by a constant flow of new offerings. Thus, design for the 21st century requires different skills and design educators are challenged to teach new skills within an already packed curriculum. How might design educators revolutionize teaching and learning to rise to 21st-century challenges? In this talk, I’ll compare two versions of a futures studies course developed for design students. Specifically, I’ll describe tradeoffs between course design decisions for flipped pedagogy and design studio pedagogy measured with faculty course evaluations as outcomes, and speculate on how reflective practices were associated with described transfer activities. I will also describe changes made to the courses and provide key insights on applying flipped pedagogy to design courses.

event link

Last updated: 2:33 pm

Design Educators Workshop: Applying the Flipped Classroom Pedagogy to Design Courses

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October 21, 2018 12:37 PM

Peter Scupelli taught a workshop for 40 university design educators at Tsinghua University October 21, 2018 as part of the Design 3.0 International Forum held in Beijing, China. The workshop focused on how design educators might use the flipped classroom pedagogy to teach design courses. Dr Scupelli used the Dexign Futures course as a case study. Dexign Futures is a required course he developed for third year undergraduate design students at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dexign Futures Case Study

How might design educators address new challenges in design education? Currently, design educators are caught between challenges: first, teaching well-established design traditions based on craft and making; and second, training students to situate their artifact making within transitional times in a volatile and exponentially changing world. The tension design educators navigate involves teaching the core of a discipline in relation to an expanding periphery where multiple disciplines interact. The epistemic challenge is how to initiate students into the field’s crystallized knowledge at the same time as fluid, emergent knowledge. Some design educators may yearn for simpler times focusing on mastery of the deep disciplinary cores. Others may discount their own core disciplinary teaching in favor of exploration of the rapidly shifting disciplinary peripheries to meet new challenges and opportunities. We acknowledge both perspectives and further posit that students need exposure to both the core and periphery of design. This introduces an interesting learning challenge: an implicit contradiction for students of design where the core/making tends to reinforce short-term horizon thinking; and the disciplinary periphery requires long-term horizon visioning. We try to address this challenge by aligning short-term design opportunities with sustainable development plans for long-term horizons. We merge design thinking and futures thinking to create “deXign” thinking. A flipped classroom pedagogy integrates design studio with an online component. The course described is called Dexign Futures. Dexign Futures is a required design studies class for all third-year undergraduate students in the products, communications, and environments tracks in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Because traditional design pedagogy poorly equips designers to integrate current human-centered design methods with long-range strategic thinking, a challenge we explore through the class is how to teach designing for the long-term horizon. The term deXign indicates an experimental type of design that integrates Futures Thinking with Design Thinking.

For more information on the Dexign Futures class go to: https://dexignfutures.com/

Last updated: 3:46 pm

Design 3.0 Forum in Beijing, China.

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October 10, 2018 2:36 PM

Peter Scupelli is presenting a talk at the Design 3.0 Forum in Beijing China on October 19. The forum is organized by Tsinghua University and KAIST University. Design 3.0 Forum aims to raise and discuss the challenging issues in design research, education and practice in this newly emerging paradigm we now face with new forms of end-user products such as intelligent products and services, DIY/fabrication tools, and IoTs. These new forms of products and services change the ways people interact with them and shape their everyday lives.  We would like to re-think about our traditional user-centered and human-centered approaches and what are new agenda to be raised and considered for future designers and design researchers to be prepared for. This is what Design 3.0 Forum is targeting for, and we hope that this can be the start of continued conversations around these issues even after this forum.

http://www.design3-0.com/en/

Last updated: 3:28 pm

China National Arts Fund Initiation and forum: Training innovative art and tech talents for the 2022 Winter Olympics Games.

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June 1, 2018 5:54 PM

Peter Scupelli delivered a keynote speech titled “Olympic projects as desirable futures” at the “China National Arts Fund Initiation and forum: Training innovative art and tech talents for the 2022 Winter Olympics Games” on June 9 at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University.

http://www.ieeac2015.org.cn/p/17/20180614/171813553838279.html

Last updated: 2:36 pm

IEERC INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS WORKSHOP: Design Thinking and Futures Thinking

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June 1, 2018 5:49 PM

Peter Scupelli taught the Design Thinking and Futures Thinking  workshop June 7-9, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The workshop was called “Using the Flipped Classroom to Teach Design Thinking and Futures Thinking.”

The world is changing at an exponential rate. How might design educators teach different types of design thinking to address challenges such as societal level sustainability? How might technology be used to create innovative learning experiences for students? How might students get more practice opportunities and feedback to better learn new kinds of design thinking. The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University launched a new curriculum undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students in 2014 to teach design led societal level sustainability. In this workshop, participants experience teaching innovations developed to teach alternative versions of design thinking for societal level sustainability through case studies of four courses taught. For example, in the Dexign Futures course, Design Thinking and Futures Thinking are combined to align short-term design with long-term visions. The Dexign Futures course was taught as a flipped classroom course with two main parts: (a) interactive online modules with interactive feedback that prepare students for (b) in-class hands-on design activities. Workshop participants will learn how to apply the design based teaching innovations demonstrated in the case study to solve current student learning challenges.

http://www.ieeac2015.org.cn/p/17/20180614/163847274598383.html

US2020 STEM Collaboratory Keynote

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January 24, 2018 3:52 PM

Kristin Hughes and Peter Scupelli are keynoting for the US2020 STEM Collaboratory workshop Thursday, February 1, 2018.

About the US2020 Challenge
The US2020 STEM Challenge is a competition for communities that are working together through cross-sector partnerships to bridge the opportunity gap and bring maker-centered learning and STEM mentorship opportunities to more girls, low-income students, and underrepresented students in their local communities.

Over 92 communities across the country applied to the competition, proposing innovative approaches for cross-sector collaboration and exciting STEM solutions in their communities. A panel of expert judges helped US2020 select fifteen finalist communities to move on to the final round of the competition. They’re currently in the process of engaging their stakeholders, refining their proposals, and will revise and resubmit their application prior to attending the STEM Collaboratory event. More information about the Challenge can be found on our website and in our press release.

The STEM Collaboratory
The celebration of their work will culminate at a STEM Collaboratory event, where communities will highlight what they’re doing in the collective impact space to bring engaging and enticing opportunities to students across the country through their cross-sector partnerships. This two-day workshop will expose communities to STEM and maker experts and creative community builders and provide an opportunity for communities to share share, learn, and inspire one another to build local movements around STEM mentorship and maker-centered learning and bridge the opportunity gap.

The objectives of the event overall are to:
●      Provide a space for teams to reflect, share, and refine their strategies for embedding maker-centered learning and STEM mentorship into their communities
●      Expose finalist teams to experts that can facilitate new learning, spark deep, rich conversation between teams, and share meaningful feedback
●      Strengthen relationships between Finalist Teams
●      Introduce helpful frameworks for working through barriers and challenges
●      Create a learning experience that is meaningful and applicable, regardless of Challenge outcome

Audience and their Work
This event will bring together 45 leaders representing 15 communities across the country. Each community will be represented at the event by 2-3 local leaders that are spearheading this work. These leaders will represent the non-profit, public, and private sectors, and are all working to strengthen their local STEM and maker-centered learning movements locally.

Each community has been working to build a collective action and impact model around STEM mentorship and maker-centered learning. All of these communities are focused on mobilizing stakeholders in their community to drive systemic change. Some of these communities also design and implement programs related to maker-centered or project-based learning. These communities are quite diverse – some are from larger cities like New York and Chicago, while others are working in more rural contexts, like Socorro, New Mexico or Allendale, South Carolina. Learn more about our finalists here.

Date + Venue

The event will take place from Wednesday, January 31- Thursday, February 1, 2018 at Alloy 26, located at 100 S Commons Suite 102, Pittsburgh, PA 15212

Last updated: 5:50 pm

Summit for Design Research

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September 22, 2017 7:02 PM

Thursday, October 5, 2017 – 8:00am to Friday, October 6, 2017 – 5:00pm

Peter Scupelli will be at the Summit for Design Research at the IIT Instititute of Design on October 5th and 6th. Activities will include meetings and an evening social event on Thursday, October 5th, and a full day of working meetings on Friday, October 6th. Additional details on the specific agenda and activities will be forthcoming.

Last updated: 1:47 pm

IASDR 2017 conference

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September 22, 2017 2:49 PM

Peter Scupelli to present a paper titled “Opening a Design Education Pipeline from University to K-12 and Back” at the IASDR 2017 conference in Cincinnati.

Opening a Design Education Pipeline from University to K-12 and Back

  • Peter Scupelli, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
  • Doris Wells-Papanek, Design Learning Network, Cross Plains, WI, USA.
  • Judy Brooks, Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
  • Arnold Wasserman, Collective Invention, San Francisco, CA, USA.

AbstractTo prepare students to imagine desirable futures amidst current planetary level challenges, design educators must think and act in new ways. In this paper, we describe a pilot study that illustrates how educators might teach K-12 students and university design students to situate their making within transitional times in a volatile and exponentially changing world. We describe how to best situate students to align design thinking and learning with future foresight. Here we present a pilot test and evaluate how a university-level Dexign Futures course content, approach, and scaffolded instructional materials – can be adapted for use in K-12 Design Learning Challenges. We describe the K-12 design-based learning challenges/experiences developed and implemented by the Design Learning Network (DLN). The Dexign Futures course we describe in this paper is a required course for third year undergraduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The “x” signifies a different type of design that aligns short-term action with long-term goals. The course integrates design thinking and learning with long-horizon future scenario foresight. Broadly speaking, we ask how might portions of a design course be taught and experienced by teachers and students of two different demographics: within the university (Design Undergraduates) and in K-12 (via DLN). This pilot study is descriptive in nature; in future work, we seek to assess learning outcomes across university and K-12 courses. We believe the approach described is relevant for lifelong learners (e.g., post-graduate-level, career development, transitional adult education).

Last updated: 1:47 pm

Future of Education Charrette

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July 20, 2017 5:44 PM

Futures of Education Charrette

Peter Scupelli is joining two dozen leading thinkers, tech visionaries, librarians and change-agents to help imagine a new universe of collaborative systems that could transform the academy.  The group convenes at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, founded by commons scholar and Nobel laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom, from July 22 to 24, 2017, to explore new patterns of scholarly commons that could help invigorate open science, the humanities and academic institutions more generally.  The charrette is being hosted by Earth Science Information Partners and the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has provided funding for this endeavor.

It is an open secret that many structures and protocols of academic research, communication, and collaboration are relics of another era, unable to take full advantage of the rich affordances of digital networks. In addition, many academic systems are overly formal, hierarchical, and credential-driven. While open platforms have significantly advanced scientific and academic missions, many fields of inquiry are discovering that open access and sharing are not enough.

What’s needed is active stewardship, curation, peer commitment and “commoning” – the social practices, ethical norms and processes by which a community can govern itself and manage its research objects. To explore the possibilities, we are convening a “pattern lexicon” charrette to identify possible “design patterns” based on the efforts of several open-science organizations committed to open access to scholarly resources.

There are already encouraging developments in this direction. Just last year, the European Commission announced support for a European scholarly commons as the future of EU science (Open Innovation). At the same time,Force11 is exploring how a scholarly commons can serve as the organizational schema for better governance and management of scientific data sets, software, work-flows, and publications.

Last updated: 2:51 pm

LEL granted Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) award

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May 24, 2017 5:45 PM

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center recently approved the lab’s request for supercomputing resources, which will be used for the lab’s research on Creative Workplace Alchemies: Using Computer Vision and Machine Learning to Study Occupancy of Individual Workspaces and Collaboration Hotspots.

Abstract. Much like creative knowledge work environments, studio-based design education environments are changing rapidly to include: multidisciplinary teams, information technology, geographically distributed teams, and flexible workspaces. Factors such as, architectural space design, furniture choices, technical infrastructure features, acoustics, socio-cultural norms, and privacy and visibility of wall-sized displays support or hinder workers in creative environments. The studio has four connected spaces: individual workspaces, collaborative spaces, a kitchen and social café area, and a distance-learning class-room. I analyze a design studio environment through time-lapse photography. This research uses vision algorithms and machine learning to identify locations where people and teams worked. In prior research we noted that teams worked more often in locations that were less visible from other locations, provided greater laptop screen and display privacy, had whiteboards, and electrical outlets. Students did individual work throughout the studio-suite regardless of the function assigned to the spaces.

Last updated: 5:46 pm