K3 2007-08 Prototyping Lab Masterplan

During 2007-08 the prototyping laboratory at K3, Malmö University, Sweden, will run 6 simultaneous courses (making a total of 12 courses) in prototyping reaching an estimate of over 250 students only within K3. At the same time, our staff members develop activities for other educational centers in an attempt of disseminating the K3-way in prototyping.

Courses

The courses we are offering during the incoming terms are:

• PC1: Physical Computing I, first year IDK, up to 60 students
• PC2: Physical Computing II, second year IDK, up to 55 students
• LI: Light Installations, free course, up to 20 students
• FT: Fashion Technology, free course, internal/external, fall/spring, up to 40 students per term - 80 in total
• BT: Body and Technology, free course, up to 20 students
• IDM: Crash course for ID Master Students, up to 20 students
• IDF: 10 points in prototyping for new coming students, up to 20 students per term - 40 in total
• IDT: Course for ID teachers and interested fellows, up to 10 participants
• Riid: Course in prototyping for real life experiences, up to 40 participants

Students' Profiles

The students' profiles vary within a pretty broad range, but if we were about to categorize the average student won't have profound knowledge in programming and will have never tinkered with electronics before. Many won't see the use of learning this skill in the first place, but their understanding will broaden during the course and their opinion shift.

The level of basic knowledge changes of course between courses. Experience shows that FT students are less familiar to the use of computers for basic operations like writing documents, image editing, or the use of powerpoint for editing presentations. In a same course we may meet an expert programmer and an anthropologist with interest in sewing. This forces the faculty members to be open to constantly move into alternative ways of teaching.

International Experiences

The teaching methodology within ID, as well as the tools developed at K3 and other educational centers can be framed as part of a very practical educational approach oriented to empower students curiosity through making. The sentence DEMO OR DIE summarizes the experiences developed by our faculty in courses that include ID techniques both in the software and hardware fields.

This approach is not unique for K3, other schools in the world apply a similar methodology. Our uniqueness comes in the education at the undergraduate level, what gives our students a special knowledge that would open the doors for them to many international master courses.

However it is my concern that our students tend not to apply to international courses, mainly because of the tuition fee and general costs of studying abroad. It should be part of our strategy to look for creative solutions to this problem. This is in anyway no the scope of this document.

Other Schools With Similar Curriculum

<<copy and paste from the other documents>>

Approaching the Scale Factor

Besides its uniqueness, K3 presents a problem more related to logistics and the importance given to prototyping by the different educations. In our opinion, some basic prototyping skills, as well as programming skills should be mandatory as part of a hypothetical foundation course in designing the K3 way.

This is unfortunately not the case and we have to cope with individual courses part of the different educations that demand different blocks of knowledge from the lab. As a result, by the end of the year we may repeat the same set of lectures over 7 times. This happens to be extremely resource consuming and drains the energy of the staff.

Therefore the need of a special strategy that would allow us to even increase the amount of students getting access to this body of knowledge beyond our current limits.

Creation of Knowledge-blocks

The first step consists in creating knowledge blocks properly documented that can be easily identifiable by the students. They should have easy names like: Analogue/Digital Input, High Power Switching: Lights and Motors, or Hacking Existing Commercial Circuits.

Each block would last 8 work hours, what implies one full day, or two consecutive days parted schedule. The prototyping laboratory would schedule a series of occasions when each one of those blocks would be repeated, allowing students from all the possible courses to study a la carte. We would create a student passport where each student would literally get a stamp for each session s/he attended.

Bigger lectures like Introduction to Prototyping, or Examples of Basic Sensor Technology would happen preferably only once per term in a masterclass format, booking the big lecture hall for all the students to attend at once.

Project Oriented Education

The different courses are already project oriented, what means that we have to focus in being part of the brief-into-proposal process, trying to make people understand about the complexity of ideas, the strategies for prototyping, or the implications of choosing certain tools and not others.

An earlier implication in the design process, will improve the development of the design objects.

Studio Situation

The ideal situation for teaching should be augmented through the creation of a studio like environment, where students get the chance to sit side by side to others working with similar projects and technologies, opening up for informal collaborations, new project development, etc.

Documentation Process

Proposed Agenda Winter 07

Educational Modules

Processing

• Exercises in using Processing