🗓 Fall 2025 Weds, 6-8:30pm
🎓 New York University Tandon School of Engineering (Brooklyn)
Technology, Management, & Innovation
👩🏻🏫 Professor: Jenny Fan
Contact: [email protected]
Syllabus Contents
This is a semester-long course worth 3 credit hours.
This introductory design studio will guide students through the digital product design process, mimicking industry practice: user research, ideation, visual design, prototyping, user testing, interaction design, and creating final mock-ups and presentations.
Classes will introduce various tools and techniques of the trade, and provide smaller individual exercises for practice while culminating in a semester-long team project. Students will be expected not only to get hands-on in Figma creating designs, but also engaging in design critique sessions to help train their visual and interaction design craft.
Ideal for aspiring product designers and entrepreneurs seeking to create early mock-ups, it also benefits students interested in understanding the design process for roles like product managers or software developers.
Design is inherently iterative. The course will traverse the entirety of the design process 3 times at different depths, so students have ample opportunities to study existing examples, learn about tools and methodologies, and put these principles into practice.
Weeks 1-2 will provide a broad overview of the design process, in the context of designing digital products in today’s tech industry.
Weeks 3-11 will be lecture-focused, roughly following the double diamond design process:
Source: Dan Nessler, originally British Design Council in 2005 (more about Double Diamond here)
A. Weeks 3-6 focus on honing product thinking through research and practical exploration to interrogate the problem space, converge into a clear problem statement, and ideate creative proposals for useful solutions.
B. Weeks 7-11 focus on functional tactics for designing products well, such as rapid prototyping methods, usability testing, and refining the interactions and visual experience to deliver a polished final product.