Master's Thesis
The Lesson Design Toolkit: A Master's Thesis
- Timeframe: 15 months (2018-2019)
- Thesis Committee: Jason Germany, Michael Patrick Smith, Kimberly Mitchell
The Lesson Design Toolkit is a Master of Design thesis project exploring the collaborative design of experiences through a case study in education.
The toolkit is a series of workbooks that help early-career college educators navigate the process of creating a lesson. As each workbook guides the way, it introduces teaching theory and design methods that are helpful in an aspect of lesson design. This approach shows how design methods can empower experts in other fields to design their own experiences.
Because most college educators aren’t formally taught how to teach, they often lack the processes and methods to effectively design classroom experiences. Designers face similar problems, but have well developed processes and methods for moving forward while building intuition. Lesson planning is a form of experience design, but it’s not approached as such. This Toolkit helps early-career college educators effectively design lessons without the benefit of extensive experience.
The Work was displayed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Presenting 15 months of work in a brief and engaging format required distilling the ideas to a single conceptual point of entry. The show ran from May-June 2019.
Photos courtesy of Mark Woods
