As a member of the full-time Industrial Design faculty at UIC, I teach undergraduate and graduate students in the Bachelor of Design (BDes) and Master of Design (MDes) programs. The undergraduate studio is an environment designed to support students in achieving the skills of formal acuity and in fostering their ability to generate, critique, and reflect on creative production. In parallel with formal, project-based assignments, my pedagogical approach for the undergraduate student emphasizes a broad perspective of the field as well as an engagement with real-world experience. Thus, my curricular design seeks an optimal balance of prescriptive and exploratory methods. While the complexity of project work and the depth of research involved increases with the experience level of the student, this dual prescriptive/explorative approach remains applicable at the graduate level where the UIC MDes is focused on a two-year master’s thesis. Regardless of the academic level of instruction, I am committed to teaching students to become critical and empathic designers.

The studio courses that I teach focus on designed objects, and I find the design of physical forms and the relationship of form to function to be indispensable pedagogical tools. Without a resolved form, an object cannot be effective in its function, and a designer can only find the best solution to a given problem by comparing it to inferior attempts. Critical thinking is fostered through dialog in this comparative approach to learning. I additionally reinforce the development of criticality through assigned writings from design journals as well as online design publications and discussion forums. Third year undergraduate students are introduced to historic examples of formal excellence in required design history courses. In my junior studio, I augment this exposure with contemporary equivalents. A field trip to the Chicago International Auto Show each February exposes students to the latest in automotive design—an area of practice that requires complex combinations of color, material and form to be resolved in a single object. Car designers are regarded by many as the greatest contemporary formalists, and this event provides opportunity to expose students to such mastery. Students are assigned to focus on and to document design details as  they record images that demonstrate excellent resolution of form. The exercise stimulates visual literacy and provides a library of references to call upon in their later coursework.

Empathic design seeks new and innovative solutions to problems by actively involving the human experience. The social and cultural diversity of a UIC classroom is an ideal setting for fostering such an approach. I take pride in my own ability to be sensitive to an individual’s interests and perspectives, and to empower each student to discover their unique voice and design identity. I have found that the most important quality a designer must possess is passion, and what most excites my students is real-world implications. To support this enthusiasm, and to expose students to individuals who excel in their areas of interest, I regularly seek out opportunities to partner with companies and manufacturers on coursework or extracurricular projects. Examples included Marbles The Brain Store (new toys and games), South Bank Chicago (bird habitats for residential real estate development), and Design House (steel-based products produced by local female owned and operated metal fabricators).

The paradigm of industrial design practice is ever-evolving. The field has begun to expand beyond the notion of object and the UIC Industrial Design faculty work collaboratively each year to advance and refine our program curriculum. Criticality and empathy remain fundamental values of my educational approach as I, too, evolve my teaching methods in response.