Open-source Hardware and Programming 2024

Last year, I was asked to reorganize and teach Open-source Hardware and Programming, a core course offered by the College of Design & Innovation for over a decade. Now that the course has wrapped up and the students' final projects have been showcased at exhibitions across China, I’m excited to share some reflections.

Open-source Hardware and Programming is designed for first-year students, giving them essential skills as both Designers and Makers. Through the course, they gain hands-on experience in electronic circuits, coding basics, interaction design, and laser cutting, all vital skills for prototyping and early-stage design.

Throughout the semester, we challenged the students with exercises that strengthened their technical skills and gave them a taste of real-world problem solving through a design thinking lens.

On the very first day, we engaged a lively group of 100 freshmen in the Open-the-Hardware challenge, where they disassembled household appliances and created visual posters to map out the components. This hands-on activity set the tone for a semester filled with exploration and creativity.

Each exercise we designed required students to accept a certain level of uncertainty, a novel experience for young minds shaped by the structured, knowledge-based education system in China. The individual or group tasks included drawing diagrams of imagined Fantasy Devices (like an automatic hair color changer) and using a laser cutter to make a no-glue, press-fit "decision dice" that could be tossed to help decide anything from dinner to weekend plans. These challenges were crafted to push students’ technical boundaries, ignite creative problem-solving, and build foundational design skills.

The course culminated in a final project, Things with a Soul, where students created interactive devices that gave “soul” to everyday objects. Imagine a microwave having a bad day and questioning your intention of heating up your dinner! Students imagined the emotional side of everyday items through simple design thinking exercises. After brainstorming keywords around “everyday things” and “emotions,” we used an AI language model to co-write a story featuring one object and one emotion. This storytelling exercise let each group imagine a playful narrative, such as an angry bike or a tired computer, sparking insights and deepening their understanding.

With the insights and skills they’d gained, students went on to design and fabricate interactive devices that were meaningful and (mostly!) efficient. This practice bridged the worlds of atoms and bytes, embodying the essence of interaction design and digital fabrication.

The feedback I received from the students makes me believe the course set an ancor on their pathway of becoming a designer, making it a truly rewarding experience for me and for the talented assistants Yue Song , Gao Yifei, Zhu Ziyi, who helped me delivering the classes. On a personal level, I love developing and running a new program, as it lets me re-learn everything from scratch (or rather, teach myself the content) while inventing new ways to deliver an innovative and unique learning experience for my students.

Stay tuned for an upcoming video showcasing the students’ final creations, a glimpse into the creativity, skill, and dedication they brought to each project!