Designing the Future (FutureLearn)

Offered by RMIT University,
Designing the Future (FutureLearn)

Learn contemporary design approaches that you can use to work through problems in the world around you. Design can offer new and interesting ways to think about and work through complex issues and situations. That’s why large organisations are now calling on designers to help understand customer relations, and why many designers are now working in communities to find ways to solve local problems.

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This course will give you an introduction to different design approaches, and how you can apply them in your day to day life, using expertise from world leaders in the field.

Explore different design approaches
Drawing on concepts and approaches from the RMIT Master of Design Futures, we will work with human-centered, participatory and design thinking principles. We will explore the practice of design through four lenses:

  • strategic design
  • service design
  • transdisciplinary design
  • transition design

The course will also introduce practical techniques – such as sketchnoting, ideation and prototyping, and critique – that you can use to engage with problems, and the people affected by them.

Learn how to apply design thinking to modern problems
Design, when used effectively and creatively, can help solve day to day problems - or think about them in a new way. Through the course we will use design thinking practices to propose new ways to address issues faced in the world today, and give you tools and techniques you can apply to your own environment and life.

Be part of the RMIT Design Studio
At RMIT we use a studio model that’s not a fixed physical space, but runs over time, with multiple people, often from different disciplines. It can include stakeholders and users and has a culture of critique. It’s about building a space for inquiry.
It’s also a place for testing ideas; anticipating and working with success and failure; participating in critical discussion without bias; and co-creating with others in a flat network of participants, leads and external experts. Through the studio, participants explore and create new ways of thinking with a view to their practical implications in the worlds of business, media and the community.
Through the course you have a chance to be part of this supportive and creative studio, and make a contribution not just to the world of design, but to the world as a whole.

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