One week from tonight is the first class in the Design Research Methods that course I’ll be teaching at the Involution Master Academy in Sunnyvale, CA. If you’re thinking of signing up, don’t wait!

I hope to see some of you there.

On Tuesday nights from October 9 to November 13 I’ll be teaching a weekly two hour class, aimed at providing first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods.

This course is part of the Involution Master Academy (an educational program for experienced professionals in design and related fields) in Sunnyvale, CA. Class size is being kept quite small to make sure that participants get significant hands-on time with instructors. Registration opens today, so sign up soon!

Full Description
This course will provide first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods. At its root, design research emphasizes learning about people and using the insights gained to inform and inspire design. We will focus on exemplary models of what research is, what it looks like, its role in concept generation, and what it produces.

Students will develop their own design research philosophy, learn how to think about people, behavior, and culture, as well as the importance of being open to new perspectives. They will also learn tactical skills they can immediately put into practice: how to conduct observations and interviews, find research participants, and interpret and synthesize results as fodder for design and storytelling.

The schedule includes:

Week 1 – Introduction to Research
Week 2 – Methods and Research Planning
Week 3 – Problem Refinement, Interviewing & Fieldwork Planning
Week 4 – Analysis & Synthesis
Week 5 – Ideation
Week 6 – Presentation

Additional Involution Master Academy Courses:

Product Architecture Symposium
Instructor Andrei Herasimchuk
Saturday October 27, 2007
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Strategic Influence by Design
Instructors Luke Wroblewski and Tom Chi
Saturday November 17, 2007
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Diego asks for ideas for the next course he might teach (co-creation anyone?). If you’ve got ideas, add ’em here or at his site (see previous link). I’d like to see a class about innovation and persuasion. As Roger Martin talks about there are some very different mental models (my phrase, not his) in the worlds of design and business. Indeed, some systems inside organizations serve as antibodies to hunt down and destroy intruders in order to keep the body healthy (oops, metaphor overload here)…rejecting processes and ideas that could be innovative. How does design thinking as a process begin to address that? The design challenge (as Martin sorta says) is not only the problem itself but the means to move the solution through the organization to where it’s championed and adopted.

That’d be a fun course.