Curriculum

Strategic Design and Management (MS) Program

The Master of Science degree is awarded for completion of 36 credits. No credits can be transferred. Students must maintain a 3.0 cumulative grade point average and fulfill all requirements in a timely manner.

PGDM 5100 Strategic Design and Management in New Economies

This course exposes and introduces the students to the contexts, the complexities, and the conditions of the external environment (i.e. technological, socio-political, economic, and demographic) of the new economy based on services, experiences, and transience. These in turn present opportunities, challenges, and new a mandate for leadership and innovation on the part of design-intensive and creative firms that are slowly subsuming traditional consulting practice. How to design, manage and improve those design firms will require new design-managerial capacity. Students will be investigating the aspects and angles of this ongoing transformation of and in the field of creative industries and will be presenting research and critique/commentary via seminal works in the field.

PGDM 5110 Designing and Implementing Sustainable Business Models

This course develops students' technical and practical abilities, capabilities, and competencies to innovate in order to commercialize and capitalize on value-creative ideas and solutions in the areas of sustainable and service design. It will engage students into development of real-life innovation implementation and operations models, strategies, and executions. The seminar will focus on the development of design innovation, business modeling and execution design capabilities, and competencies with reflection, coaching, mentoring, and organizational development methodologies.

PGDM 5120 Managing High-Performance Creative Project Teams

This course engages students in hand-on project management techniques worthy of the new socio-economic conditions, constraints, and controversies. Students will - in groups - define and practice techniques for fashioning order out of chaos, especially in the design management field with fewer rules, greater flow of information, and environmental dynamics, but with a mandate for rapid innovation, yet resiliency and gracefulness in frequent failure situations. They will develop and leverage their abilities to inspire, their capabilities to influence, their interpersonal competencies, and their talent to lead. They will practice choice-making based on reductive and incomplete information, leveraging their rich experiential knowledgebase, and identify how to productively and with impact function in organic, sometimes dysfunctional non-hierarchies. They will demonstrate the high-performance team leadership with small group projects, accompanied by required field work and qualitative, quantitative research as well as collaborative methods. Students will also contrast the new approach against traditional project management methods, and will demonstrate how projects are different from operations. The will collectively generate a framework for the new project manager, the required traits, commitments, and practices. They will deliver small, contained project exercises to demonstrate their political skills in building influence, inspiring teams as merely borrowed resources and expanding such resources, estimating realistically budgets and costs, timelines and schedules, and quality specifications, and integrate, control, measure, and account for group and individual performance.

PGDM 5130 New Design Firms

This course exposes and introduces the students to the firm-internal and industry-specific contexts, complexities, and conditions of the new design or design-intensive firm producing service and experience prodcuts. These novel conditions in turn present opportunities, challenges, and new a mandate for leadership and innovation on the part of design-intensive and creative firms that are slowly subsuming traditional consulting practice. How to design, manage and improve those design firms? How to define their strategy, structure, scale, scope, and social position - variables that will require new design-managerial capacity? Students will be investigating the aspects and angles of this ongoing transformation of the nature and attributes of future firms in the field of creative industries and will be presenting research and critique/commentary via seminal works in the field.

PGDM 5140 Design Innovation and Leadership

This course develops students' personal and intellectual abilities, capabilities, and competencies to lead and undertake value-creative ventures in the areas of sustainable and services design. It will engage students into developing leadership - for themselves and others - for the purpose of real-life entrepreneurial models, strategies, and executions. The seminar will focus on the development of leadership values, abilities, capabilities, and competencies with reflection, coaching, mentoring, and organizational development methodologies.

PGDM 5150 Regulatory and Ethical Contexts

This course exposes students to the new complexities and intricacies information and information technologies as products, productive processes, and production modes in their own right. Some of the more interesting and controversial course topics will focus on the eclectic and diversified public, private, and mixed governance structures for Intellectual Property and Intellectual Property Protection, Security, Privacy, as well as the practices of firms with regards to regulatory opportunism, regulatory, capture, and regulatory arbitrage. The regime is transforming and the rules and assumptions are shifting. The astute managers of design-intensive firms must learn how to act expediently and effectively in behalf of their clients and their proper firms.

Students will be learning the various angles of a quickly complicating regime via case studies, role play, and moot court trials.

PGDM 5200 Integrative Studio 1

This studio explores the overlap between business and design. It brings together 1) the backgrounds and current work contexts of the students, 2) what students are learning in the management courses they are taking in parallel with this course, 3) complex multidisciplinary projects requiring iterative, collaborative and innovative responses. The course is run as a studio: a comprehensive brief derived from a real case, or provided by a live project partner, will require the students to work as team doing diverse field research in order to make and then intensively critique prototyped interventions, all the while presenting their findings and proposals to colleagues, experts and stakeholders for critical feedback. In order to work on the project, students will learn a range of research methods, ideation processes, and theoretical frameworks by which to make reasoned judgments about strategic responses to complicated situations. In this first Integrative Studio 1, students will do a wide-ranging audit of their current knowledge, skills and values. They will learn about tools for this kind of personal reflection and learn to articulate what they do not know in order to determine learning pathways forward. The brief for this studio, reflecting the courses being done in parallel, will concern the interface between workspace and workflow tools on the one hand, and organizational culture and practices on the other. Being the first Integrative Studio 1, the process will be heavily scaffolded with discrete tasks and multiple milestones.

PGDM 5210 Integrative Studio 2

This is the second Integrative Studio exploring the overlap between business and design. It brings together 1) what students have learned in the courses they have taken throughout the degree program, including in parallel with this class, 2) complex multidisciplinary projects requiring iterative, collaborative and innovative responses. The course is run as a studio: a comprehensive brief derived from a real case, or provided by a live project partner, will require the students to work as team doing diverse field research in order to make and then intensively critique prototyped business models, all the while presenting their findings and proposals to colleagues, experts and stakeholders for critical feedback. In order to work on the project, students will learn a range of research methods, ideation processes, and theoretical frameworks by which to make reasoned judgments about strategic responses to complicated situations. In this second Integrative Studio, students will do a wide-ranging audit of their emerging knowledge, skills and values. They will learn about tools for this kind of personal knowledge management and learn to articulate what they know as strategically directed portfolios. The brief for this second Integrative Studio, reflecting the courses being done in parallel, will concern new business model opportunities for sustainable service systems in emerging economies.

PGDM 5902 Independent Project – Field Study/Research Study

This hands-on, special projects course is an opportunity for students to draw on the expertise of faculty to develop a domain of expertise of strategic value to their future careers, and also to their success in the Integrative Studio 2. Independent Project course will take place primarily as a student-driven, off-campus exercise complemented by as a series of intensive meetings (possibly all online) with research tasks to be completed between the meetings. The expectation is that students develop a rich portrait of the design business innovation opportunities in a designated context: new social/market trends, new technologies/practices, emerging and alternative economies, transitioning political/regulatory frameworks. The emphasis of the course is on gathering and organizing the research material that will drive their participation in the Integrative Studio 2. Whatever final form this course may take for the student, a prior agreement with the Program Director and with the faculty is mandatory.