Groups of students roamed around campus early Friday afternoon, pondering doorknobs and trash cans and analyzing the many aspects of design that generally go overlooked.
In order to better understand the design process, Erkki Huhtamo, professor of “Design Culture: an Introduction,” created “The Great UCLA Design Game,” in which students participated in place of their lecture.
The course gives an overview of what makes up design culture, the thought process behind it, and the role it plays in everyday life.
“The idea came to me once ““ like a flash from the sky ““ when I was coming from the Northern Lights coffee shop,” Huhtamo said. “And I was walking through the sculpture garden and I thought, “˜Let’s try something a bit different.'”
The game, which is similar to a scavenger hunt, is a mystery to students until the day of their adventure. Their only instructions are to wear good shoes and not bring too much to carry.
The students work in groups of up to four and are assigned three places on campus to visit. Along the way they answer questions and identify certain aspects about the design of the campus.
Additionally, they are required to draw a map of their route and identify the features they find on their journey.
“The design game I came up with … is meant to increase the students’ understanding of design in everyday life. Much design is very invisible, so people don’t know that door knobs and signs are design. Basically, I want them to start looking at their everyday surroundings with a kind of new eyes, and this is my main motivation behind the (game),” Huhtamo said.
He added that he thinks undergraduates don’t get enough exercise, and the game is a way to get them to walk around and explore campus for at least three hours.
“I believe that people also choose the same routes across campus every day, between the same buildings, then back to the dorm. There are many things around campus that they never see and probably don’t know exist,” he said.
The groups started from their class in Haines Hall and went to places around campus such as the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden and the Inverted Fountain.
Students were instructed to find elements such as bad, invisible and sound design.
“It’s interesting because I’ve been on campus a long time and you notice things you’ve never noticed before ““ a lot of commonplace things that actually have a lot of thought,” second-year business economics student Binbin Xing said.
Xing said she noticed a few elements of bad design, such as the path of the wheelchair ramp on Bruin Walk, and a window in Moore Hall that looks like a door, which students with no prior knowledge could easily get stuck in.
Katherine Kim, a fourth-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, said she doesn’t normally think of sound as design, but she noticed aspects of sound design when she went to the Inverted Fountain.
“The water goes down instead of up, which creates a unique sound for people to hear,” she said. “It’s cool because you think about a lot of different patterns and about things people take for granted. It’s open for interpretation.”
Huhtamo said he wanted to combine body and mind in the game and bring students to areas of campus they may not have had the time to explore prior to the design game.
“I’m starting to look at design ““ the positives and negatives, flaws. I really do look at details now, even trash cans. I found a flaw in a trash can,” second-year mechanical engineering student James Barbour said.
Huhtamo got the idea from a group of artists from the 1950s and 1960s called Situationist International, who wanted to renew their perception of the urban environment.
They wanted to see the cities where they lived differently, so they would roam around the cities creating private maps for themselves.
This exploration is rooted in psychogeography, which is the study of an environment in order to better understand the behavior and emotions of its inhabitants, Huhtamo said.
One of the ways to execute psychogeography is through a “dérive,” the French word for “drift,” or wandering without preconceptions.
Third-year Design | Media Arts student Gwen Cifuentes said she had never been to the botanical garden before the assignment.
“I’m tired, but it’s fun getting to know the campus better,” Cifuentes said.
In addition to the design game, Huhtamo said he has been experimenting with other methods of teaching design concepts with activities like an alarm-clock symphony.
Students bring whatever they use as an alarm clock and create a symphony to learn about the aspects of sound design.
“We have to look for new methods and ways of renewing the learning experience and also people’s perceptions of the surroundings in which they are spending much of their early life,” Huhtamo said.