Artisan Lab: Introduction to Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life

Arts Entrepreneurship 1000-01

MTH 10:00-11:20 WWIII room 106

Professor Betsy Towns

Email: townsb@uncsa.edu Cell: 919-428-1717 Office: 109 WWV

Office hours (at the library café, in my office, via walk-and-talk, or on zoom) by appointment-

email me with your available times.

Online presence (Betsy’s Class Blog) (with class notes, images, presentations)

CANVAS (with required readings, online syllabus, assignment portals, etc. )

DESCRIPTION

The course uses design thinking to address the “wicked problem” of designing your life and career. Offering a framework, tools, space and a community of peers and mentor. The course employs a design thinking approach including empathizing, defining challenges, ideating, prototyping, discussion, reflection, revising to help students from any major develop a constructive and effective approach to finding and designing their lives and vocations during and after their time at UNCSA. Topics include the integration of work and worldviews, ideation & prototyping techniques, designing work/life balance, and methods of critique.

SLO’s

Understand Design Thinking practices and how DT differs from other thinking
Design a plan that will guide your academic decision-making
Articulate a life vision
Identify what next actions move them toward that vision

Relevant to GER 1: Students will analyze a literary or artistic text or artifact.

I have planned the first iteration of this course to follow the Five Steps of the Design Thinking Process to show some of the ways that this is a non-linear, iterative practice. We’ll follow the steps in this order in the class outline, but during projects, I think you’ll find that you loop through the steps many times and over different paths.

We’ll start by studying the lives of artists and thinkers whose lives appear visible in their work, and vice versa. You might think of popular examples like Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, but we’ll look at people you’re less likely to know. I laid out that segment to show you some extremes, with the idea that exaggerated examples of others’ selves and work give us models to work with and against as we define our own selves and work. Then, we will draw on the fields of psychology and philosophy to get more specific in the ways we define our selves and work. Next, we’ll spend time thinking about graphics as a tool to make our ideas clearer to ourselves and visible to others to engage with, perhaps understand, and help us further imagine our lives and life goals. That will happen in an interactive prototyping process, tested along the way in class groups, and resulting in a set of plans that can serve as a map or touchstone as you move through your daily life, education, and/or career.

If you do the work, by the end of the term you should: know more about the relationship between the work artists make and the lives they designed or happened into, have ways to consider episodes in your own life in relation to your work, have gained some methods for finding inspiration, and have started a set of practices that can help you puzzle through challenging or transitional moments in your life.

Course requirements are: preparing for and discussion of assigned readings, screenings, and activities, participating in design workshops in class, journaling, and preparation of three projects.

Required Materials: all readings and viewings will be made available online. Each student needs a physical notebook or journal to bring to class, together with an assortment of pens and pencils.