The Digital Communications Department Mission

The department of Design, Media, & Technology develops students who solve problems using the human-centered design process. The department combines liberal arts ideals with the diverse disciplines that inform the field, which produces students who think critically and creatively and engage in lifelong learning. Through an emphasis on problem-solving and team-based collaboration, students will apply principles and methods of human-centered design to the creation, storage, analysis, processing, and delivery of information.

Goals and Objectives

1. Frame the problem

   • Analyze data, applying relevant human-centered design/disciplinary principles and methods, to identify meaningful patterns or trends in order to draw appropriate conclusions.

   • Describe and prioritize design problems to be solved (which could include, setting specifications, defining organizational objectives/purpose, audience need and workflows, accounting for the context of use, etc.).
     
     

2. Research

   • Choose appropriately reliable and valid methods or methodology to answer specific research questions.

   • Effectively execute valid and reliable methods to answer research questions. (for example, usability testing, contextual observation, interviews, focus groups, secondary research, industry-standard analytics, etc.)
     
     

3. Brainstorm/ideate (generating feasible, desirable and viable solutions to problems)

   • Demonstrate the ability to generate a wide number of solutions based on specific problems/specifications.

   • Demonstrate the ability to generate innovative/creative/integrative solutions to solve a specific problem.
     
     

4. Prototype (the iterative process of designing and building a well-executed, feasible, viable, and desirable solution to a problem)
   
   • Solves specific problem/s by creating feasible, viable, and desirable solutions (evaluating how effectively the solution solves the problem)
   • Create a well-executed solution (evaluating the quality of execution of the solution)