Designing paths to peace

This MIT OpenCourseWare offers selected lecture notes, details of projects and examples, and tools taken from the Designing Paths to Peace undergraduate course taught in the autumn of 2002.

This course teaches creative design based on the scientific method through the design, engineering, and manufacture of a detailed inlaid tile. This is an introductory lecture/studio course designed to teach students the basic principles of design and expose them to the design process. Throughout the course, students will be introduced to the terminology and concepts that underlie all forms of visual art; which – in many ways – forms the basis for the design of all physical objects. Along with learning mechanical skills, thinking both critically and visually, and working with different media, the students will consider how the arts grow out of and respond to particular cultural contexts and ideas; and how these thinking patterns can be applied to virtually all types of design.

The focus of this course is to learn the Peer Review Evaluation Process (PREP) by creating inlaid tiles that are of deep significant meaning to the team members that create them. The homework projects will help teams of three students to design and build their tile projects whose elements are manufactured by students on an abrasive waterjet machining centre from digital solid models of the tiles that the teams create. At the end of the course, the tiles will be exhibited in the student art gallery.

Students will also be introduced to a number of different solid modeling and design tools. In addition to commercial professional design tools such as SolidWorks® and CorelDRAW®, the students will be introduced to a new design environment where the objects in the design can be parameterized algorithmically.

[Description and screenshot taken from MIT OCW page for this course. (c) MIT used under the terms of their CC-NC-SA license.]

Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-993-designing-paths-to-peace-fall-2002/index.htm
Author: Alex Slocum
Publication Date: 2002-12
Source: http://ocw.mit.edu/
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Rights: Copyright MIT. Use subject to a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike License and other terms of use. For full details see http://ocw.mit.edu/terms/