Peter Scupelli

Presentation@2nd Annual Winter School Design Summit: Peter Scupelli gave a talk on “How might design educators teach to Transition Design?” at The Glasgow School of Art’s 2nd Annual Winter School Design Summit in Scotland. The theme of this year’s summit was Innovation from Tradition, and explored the relationship between culture and economy, between design and its consumption, as a means of formulating alternative economic and social arrangements for living, exemplified by rural living and a non-industrialized economy. The summit hoped to turn a network of known entities into a fledgling community, to shift pedagogies into share practices and to establish a platform for future exchanges. Students and faculty from KADK Copenhagen and KISD Cologne, the PhD cohort of Konstfack Stockholm and Glasgow School of Art’s PGT (Postgraduate Taught) Masters in Design Innovation as well as their PGR (Postgraduate Research) students participated. Abstract: How might design educators transition their courses to educate the next generations of designers to transition design to achieve sustainable futures? Design educators are caught between competing challenges: first, teaching well-established design traditions based on craft and making; and second, training students to situate their artifact making within transitional times in a volatile and exponentially changing world. Design educators can navigate such tensions by linking the core of their discipline in relation to an expanding periphery where multiple disciplines interact. Teaching to transition design introduces a interesting teaching and learning design challenges. While the first formal presentation of Transition Design by Terry Irwin, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Gideon Kossoff occurred in 2013, there were many conversations among faculty and students leading to up to it. In this paper, I describe five courses that I taught at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design from 2011 to 2016. Through this case study, I describe how one newly hired faculty member began to integrate the new vision for the School of Design based on Transition Design in the courses I taught to undergraduates and graduate students. The new Undergraduate, Graduate and Doctoral curriculum were deployed in fall semester 2014. The intended audience for this paper is faculty and students that are nervous and excited about undergoing curricular changes.

Designing the Futures: Methodology, Tools, and Practices: Peter Scupelli gave a Keynote Lecture at the “Designing the Futures: Methodology, Tools, and Practices” Digital Salon organized by Tsinghua University on July 5, 2020. The lecture was titled “Dexign Futures for Challenging Times.” In "Olympics Projects As Desirable Futures,” Scupelli frames thinking about the future development of the Winter Olympics from the perspective of Dexign Thinking. He suggested that the project team think of sustainable long-term development for the Olympic Games and not only design for 2022, but look ahead to 2050 and even 2100. “Futures are made by design,” said Scupelli. “We looked at Herb Simon’s definition of design as going from a current situation to a preferable situation. The 2022 Winter Olympics are a strategic opportunity to imagine preferable situations in year 2050 and 2100.” Scupelli also noted that from his perspective, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s plan for 2050 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as examples of desirable futures to inform the design challenge of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Scupelli delivered his keynote speech “Olympic Projects as Desirable Futures” at the China National Art Foundation. Scupelli’s keynote was part of the launching ceremony and forum for the Art and Technology Talents Training Project for the Winter Olympics, held at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University. Scupelli was appointed to be an advisor for the China National Art Fund – Training Innovative Art Tech Talents for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Georgia Tech Invited Lecture: Title: Teaching to Future - Tradeoffs Between Flipped Classroom and Design Course Pedagogies. Peter Scupelli gave a talk titled “Teaching to Future – Tradeoffs Between Flipped Classroom and Design Course Pedagogies.” at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. In the 21st century, change is exponential. Products and services are designed and developed faster, and their shelf-life disrupted by a constant flow of new offerings. Thus, design for the 21st century requires different skills and design educators are challenged to teach new skills within an already packed curriculum. How might design educators revolutionize teaching and learning to rise to 21st-century challenges? In this talk, I’ll compare two versions of a futures studies course developed for design students. Specifically I’ll describe tradeoffs between course design decisions for flipped pedagogy and design studio pedagogy measured with faculty course evaluations as outcomes, and speculate on how reflective practices were associated with described transfer activities. I will also describe changes made to the courses and provide key insights on applying flipped pedagogy to design courses.

United Nations World Urban Forum: Peter Scupelli is presenting a paper titled “The Faster Ones Don’t Always Win: Dexign Futures Thinking for Innovation in Urban Contexts” at the United Nations 1oth World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi, UAE. “We live in the Anthropocene Era. Change is exponential. Design and the impact of design is everywhere around us. Human beings are a force shaping the planet’s geology, ecosystems, and weather. Our times are often described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Products and services are developed faster, hold a shorter shelf-life disrupted by new offerings, and exist in the wider environment with existential challenges such as climate change and sustainability. What specific value sets embedded within product and service innovation processes help or hinder the achievement of long term sustainable development goals? Rapid change contrasted to relatively stable times, can be confusing and may catch many unprepared. Ways of designing that until recently worked, now are questioned. While speeding up the development cycle can solve short term problems, rapid prototyping alone does not guarantee alignment with long term goals. Thus, within dynamic and rapidly changing environments where long term goals matter, designers need new paths forward and perspectives to shape sustainable product and service innovations. Design that considers the complexity of sustainable lifestyles differs from the development products and services that are indifferent to local contexts. For one, societal problems situated in context require multiple perspectives to inform processes. Yet commonly taught human-centered design processes can easily default to a narrow version of customer-centered design that ignores varied contexts and values. Under time pressure, designers’ focus can default to customer needs, ignoring the richer perspectives that explore what it means to be human and to lead a meaningful community life. While it is helpful to consider customer needs and product opportunities, it can be problematic to stop there. The type of Human-Centered Design Thinking that worked in the past to understand customer needs for the design of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and services, needs to be adapted when used to accomplish sustainable development goals. A service design framing allows designers to consider both customer needs and service provider needs. But sustainable lifestyles involve more stakeholders than customer and service provider. One must consider multiple levels of the Socio-Ecological context (e.g., individual, group, organizations, communities, public policy), and differing value sets (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Tools and methods that allow for different views and perspectives where innovation is grounded, afford designers finding new opportunities for economic development. In other words, new ways of looking at problems can provide solutions to previously ignored problems and new opportunities for development.”

Runs the DexignFutures.org website. Here you can find open-source versions of the Dexign Futures courses taught at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. This is a companion website for the https://dexignfutures.com/ webpage where you will find publications and information on the Dexign Futures research project. The goal of the DexignFutures.org website is to broadly disseminate Dexign Futures materials so that you can learn to Dexign Futures and teach the methods learned if you like. There are two ongoing efforts for the 15-week semester-long Dexign Futures course: provide an English version and in collaboration with Professor Fu Zhiyong from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China create a translated version of Dexign Futures in Chinese. Professor Peter Scupelli from the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon is developing a 7-week version of Dexign Futures for CMU students offered in Fall 2019-2020. He is developing the equivalent of a 45-hour course to be offered at CMU Qatar spring 2021. As these different versions become available, open-source versions of the courses will be posted on this website. Sustainability is often framed in terms of long-range challenges unfolding over periods of a generation or more, for example looking to a specified multi-decadal time horizon like the year 2050 (WBCSD, 2009). Dexign Futures explicitly focused on aligning near-term design action with sustainable futures. Dexign Futures grew out of a course titled Dexign the Future originated in 2013 by Arnold Wasserman as Nierenberg Chair Visiting Professor. The course was co-taught by Wasserman via remote telepresence and Prof. Peter Scupelli on-site. https://dexignthefuture.com/ The “X” in Dexign was originated by Wasserman to signify an experimental form of design and design education combining design thinking with futures thinking to align near term design action with long-range vision goals – while navigating uncertainty and accelerating innovation toward desired futures (Wasserman, Scupelli, & Brooks 2015ab; Scupelli, Wasserman, Brooks, 2016; Scupelli, Brooks,Wasserman, 2016). In 2016 and 2017, Dexign Futures was taught with the flipped classroom pedagogy as an alternative to the traditional lecture approach (Scupelli & Brooks, 2018). “Flipped” courses shift new-content exposure to pre-class work and use class time for hands-on application activities (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). Pre-class work included online readings, videos, and interactive questionnaires providing immediate feedback; as well as a mechanism for students to submit questions to the instructor ahead of each session. Weekly reflections asked students to explain how they might integrate futures methods into design practice. The online platform, Open Learning Initiative (OLI), included an information dashboard highlighting the top five questions that students had answered incorrectly in the pre-work, so that the instructor could address student misconceptions. Discussion then paved the way to active engagement with hands-on individual and group activities, during which the instructor provided just-in-time guidance.

Design 3.0 Forum in Beijing, China. The forum is organized by Tsinghua University and KAIST University. Design 3.0 Forum aims to raise and discuss the challenging issues in design research, education and practice in this newly emerging paradigm we now face with new forms of end-user products such as intelligent products and services, DIY/fabrication tools, and IoTs. These new forms of products and services change the ways people interact with them and shape their everyday lives. We would like to re-think about our traditional user-centered and human-centered approaches and what are new agenda to be raised and considered for future designers and design researchers to be prepared for. This is what Design 3.0 Forum is targeting for, and we hope that this can be the start of continued conversations around these issues even after this forum.

IEERC INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS WORKSHOP: Design Thinking and Futures Thinking Peter Scupelli taught the Design Thinking and Futures Thinking workshop June 7-9, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The workshop was called “Using the Flipped Classroom to Teach Design Thinking and Futures Thinking.” The world is changing at an exponential rate. How might design educators teach different types of design thinking to address challenges such as societal level sustainability? How might technology be used to create innovative learning experiences for students? How might students get more practice opportunities and feedback to better learn new kinds of design thinking. The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University launched a new curriculum undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students in 2014 to teach design led societal level sustainability. In this workshop, participants experience teaching innovations developed to teach alternative versions of design thinking for societal level sustainability through case studies of four courses taught. For example, in the Dexign Futures course, Design Thinking and Futures Thinking are combined to align short-term design with long-term visions. The Dexign Futures course was taught as a flipped classroom course with two main parts: (a) interactive online modules with interactive feedback that prepare students for (b) in-class hands-on design activities. Workshop participants will learn how to apply the design based teaching innovations demonstrated in the case study to solve current student learning challenges.

Futures Panel@2016 a2ru National Conference Peter Scupelli gave a talk on the opening plenary panel 2016 a2ru National Conference at the University of Colorado in Denver. The theme of this year’s conference was ArtsRx: Creative Venture, Wellbeing & the New Humanities. The conference highlighted keynote speakers, panels, breakout sessions and workshops that explore and reflect arts-integrative interdisciplinary research and practice in higher education related to the following topics: Arts and Health Arts and Entrepreneurship Science, Engineering, Arts & Design (S.E.A.D.) New Directions and Applications in the Humanities The opening plenary panel was a “Futures Panel” — using foresight as a cross-cutting lens to motivate a2ru’s work, to provide a bridge for adopting futures thinking into practice (as artists, scholars, interdisciplinarians), and to highlight it as a core skill for academic leadership. The panel was composed of a collection of futures-based practitioners in the arts and was moderated by J.D. Talasek, Director of Cultural Program at the National Academy of Sciences, with student respondents from MIT, UT Dallas, and UC Denver.

Teaching Interaction Design in Physical, Digital, and Hybrid Environments @ Interaction Design Education Summit 2016. Peter Scupelli and Austin Lee gave a talk on “Teaching Interaction Design in Physical, Digital, and Hybrid Environments” at the Interaction Design Education Summit 2016, interaction16 (IXDA) Conference in Helsinki, Finland. Summary: Over the past two decades, new technologies shifted what Interaction Design (IxD) students need to learn for professional practice. In the mid-nineties, IxD education covered interface design and web design to the plethora of topics currently explored today, such as, sensor networks, smart environments, smart cities, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality Interfaces, and so forth. To keep IxD university programs relevant, educators seek new ways for students to learn to design in emergent areas such as: larger scale environments (e.g., smart environments, Internet of Things, augmented reality interfaces). New technologies and design opportunities often require new design and prototyping methods.

Peter Scupelli is an assistant professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His teaching and research focus on shaping behavior through design: how human behavior, information technology and the physical environment can support learning, coordination in high-reliability organizations and sustainable behavior choices. Scupelli’s training and career path link architecture, interaction design and human-computer interaction research. He holds a PhD in human-computer interaction; master of design in design for interactions and an architecture degree. LEARN!2050 and Dexign Futures Arnold Wasserman, IDSA, and Peter Scupelli explore how we might redesign education to face the challenges and opportunities of a sustainable future. Increasingly, designers operate within ever-broader contexts (i.e., technological, social, political, environmental and global). Design for sustainable futures requires the ability to envision longtime horizon strategic scenarios shaped by forces likely to drive change in broader contexts. Traditional pedagogy poorly equips designers to integrate long-range, strategic thinking with current human-centered design methods.