The Loft Redesign

Those of you who attended Personal Statements Friday night received a free copy of Ambidextrous, our Design magazine, and a letter from Banny, David, and myself outlining some of the changes we are making for next year. One of the most ambitious is a complete tear-down and redesign of the Loft. We plan to rebuild it as a modern studio space in time for the opening of the new Design Building in the Fall of this year. Our idea is to make the space more flexible and easy to reconfigure, featuring updated technology and connectivity, and set up so that we can prototype new ways of working together. Other than those general guidelines we are open to new design ideas.

The Loft is an important element of the Design experience at Stanford and we are very aware that we a messing with one of the crown jewels of the grad program. The Loft was certainly "home base" for my Master's year- I probably spent more nights in the Loft than I did in my apartment. I imagine many of you did as well and you have a lot of feelings about the place. We’d love your ideas on this subject, particularly if you work in a great design space (or know of one) that we can come see. We will be prototyping some of our ideas (of course) as the year progresses and we are open to a radical re-thinking of the space. We look forward to a lively discussion about your ideas.

Undergraduate program- Design major

The Undergraduate Program is based in the Mechanical Engineering school and we have no plans to change the basic math/science/ and engineering basics of the major. We still assume that the student wants to be an engineer - the only question is "what kind?"

Freshman year is, therefore, still dominated by the math (20 units) and physics (12 units) requirements, as well as the University's Intro to Humanities (IHUM) and Program in writing and rhetoric (PWR) requirements. This year, for the first time, Banny taught a Freshman Seminar called "Thinking Like a Designer", the first time to our knowledge that the design curriculum was introduced in Freshman year. This is an experiment to see if we can attract motivated students earlier than Sophomore year. We'll see what the conversion rate is next year.

In the Sophomore Year we want to get students ready to declare the major and that generally means they try-out design by taking Art 60: Basic Design and ME101: Visual Thinking. If that goes well then we generally recommend they finish up any math and science requirements and get the psychology requirements (2 classes) out of the way. They sometimes can complete and engineering breath course as well.

The Junior and Senior Year program is being expanded so that there is a required Design class every quarter. That's adding two new Design classes next year, in a sequence that looks like the chart at the beginning of this blog entry

There are two "bookends" in this program. At the beginning we have the Intro class, ME115a, that surveys every element of the Design curriculum and gives the student a taste of the subject. It is a chance for the student (and us) to see if they have any aptitude for the subject. The other end is ME216b: Implementation, where the student demonstrates their learning by executing a capstone project. In between we cover each of the key areas of design thinking in more depth, using project-based learning as our method.

One new class of note is ME115c - Business Factors for Designer - more about that later.