Suomeksi
Posts
Story and photos by Johanna Lievemaa
Reporting after the Design Management -course
What is Design Management? It is a far wider concept than one 5 credit course can cover.
“Design is too important to be left to Designers.” (Raymond Loewy)
 |
| Concept Designs by Kristina and Sabrina |
We got a visiting lecturer Simona Vitalini to guide us through varying subjects. We thought about being a designer, what it means and who exactly is a designer? Crowdsourcing has become popular and anyone can create things on the home computer. The course is not only for future designers, we went through a lot of the powers that are behind the creative process, as the course name "Design Management" suggests. There's research, design thinking, innovation and values. We studied convergence and divergence and the importance design has for innovation. We talked a lot about values and what ethical problems or responsibilities designers have. We also had visitors from all over the world telling us about cultural differences in design and in the workplace. Of course our students are multicultural, too, so we had a lot to talk about.
We learned about so many things I can't list all here. One of the subjects that interested me was brands (and logos), business identities and how they are communicated. We also got to hear about influential designers and we did some design company visits. And we had for example someone from the theatre world to give us exercises concerned with group dynamics and leadership.
We got to practice how to pitch and sell our ideas to the clients. The biggest assignment on the course was a real project. Most did some designing for Antti Hietala. There was Klubin Tiistai Tummat or Hang the DJ projects to choose from, consisting of logos, posters, merchandise and all kind of marketing material for the client. My group chose to do a whole different thing, the http://int.nonukeart.org/ poster project. We made a website for our posters and will be exhibiting them also at school next year, stay tuned!
 |
| Kaisu, Camille, me and Yukyung pitching our ideas |
All in all it was a very effective and enlightening course, but the one thing all our teachers could take note of was our feedback session yesterday. We all went to Runokahvila and talked about the course and the subjects a bit more. We also gave feedback to Simona and she gave each project their grades and comments and even gave every single student their personal feedback. A similar nice event was the UXdesign / Project Management / Demola Academy end EXPO last week where all lecturers and students explored what everyone had done and gave and got feedback. It's a good direction if that's where we are headed. We give a lot of feedback about our courses online and we get comments of our work when we present them in front of the class but nothing beats sitting down and talking about things together.
 |
| Feedback coffee and tea |
|||
The Design Management Course is part of the optional studies of Degree Programme in Media
Read more posts by and about IMPs, the international media programme students.
|||
