Bill's Courses at Portland State University (PSU)
Bill currently teaches two courses at Portland State University in the Department of Engineering & Technology Management (ETM). Click here for a link to the department.
The fully online course Bill teaches in all three PSU terms for the regular school year is ETM 347U: Introduction to Product Design. This undergraduate course is about applying the basics of design thinking process for developing new physical product concepts that meet real human needs. The course is open to all upper level PSU students, but especially to those in the Design Thinking/Innovation/Entrepreneurship (DTIE) PSU cluster. The basics of design thinking as applied to physical product concept development are presented and taught. Each student also executes a term project beginning with finding a real human need to conceptualizing a final physical product solution to that need. Besides the learning knowledge in the course and its textbook, students must do need-finding research, define their found human need, brainstorm and sketch their ideas, make a rough physical mockup and CAD model of their concept, and test their final concept solution. All relevant design thinking process skills are taught in the course. The course often has a broad cross-section of student backgrounds and most all do very well in the course regardless that many have never had this kind of design experience or project work before. The textbook for the course is The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.
A second course Bill teaches at PSU is a remote/Zoom/synchronous summer graduate course, ETM 556: User-Centered Innovation. This graduate course is not only about a focus on the product or service user as the center for developing an innovative solution concept, but it targets engaging all of the users/stakeholders as the designers of the solution—a User As Designer (UAD) approach. The course is also based on the design thinking process, and heavily on the work of Elizabeth Sanders and her approach to participatory design, co-design, and generative design research. This entails engaging the user/customer/stakeholder directly in the design process in order to develop their ideas and concepts for human need solutions from their perspective and experience. The course graduate students execute a term project where they create a UAD-based management system concept (since ETM is a management department). This is truly a design management exercise where the ETM graduate students must be facilitators and directors, but not do the core design work themselves. The course student managers support users/customers/stakeholders by creating a management system concept that includes direction, skills, materials, process, expertise, and focus to help them achieve logical and reasonable design ideas, concepts, and a final solution. The textbook used in this course is The Convivial Toolbox by Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Stappers.
