Graduation Requirements and Course Desriptions

*Required courses.

** Pursuant to the graduation requirements determined by the Graduate School of Social Sciences, as of the 2017-2018 Fall semester, all master’s program students are required to make a presentation at a conference approved by the Department of Design, Technology, and Society.

***        Students who complete the program by taking the following courses are deemed specialized in the “Gastronomy and Design” track. The track is denoted on the Master’s Program Diploma Supplement as the student’s field of specialization.

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND CONTENTS

Listed elective courses are for information purposes only. At the beginning of each semester, the course load of the faculty members and the interdisciplinary structure of the program are taken into account, accordingly courses are offered after the evaluation of the department."

DIS 501 Design in Social Context: This course covers a variety of topics including evolution of design concept and professions in a social and historical context; stakeholders of design activity; design process as a socially conditioned creative activity; specifying the role of designer as a “social actor”; emerging professions in design activities; social impact of design activity in different fields- urban, industrial, communication, business etc; the role of design in consumption and sustainable futures; design identity in national and global contexts; politics of design; comparative analysis of different fields related to design; political economy of (de)sign; issues in design for social innovation; design as social criticism.

DIS 502 Social Theory of Science and Technology: This course provides an introductory overview of the social theories of science and technology also known as “Science and Technology Studies” (STS). This field has especially become vibrant and prominent within social sciences in the last two decades. Voluminous body of work produced by STS scholars have important implications for design researchers as this relatively new area sheds light onto the complex relationships between social structures/actors, science and technology. Design and designing are inherently important parts of this intricate web of relationships. In this context, a working knowledge of these theories is invaluable tools for any design researcher.

DIS 511 Typographic Dialogues: City, Culture, Language: The city is a living medium of communication. When typography joins this flow, the outcome is a language with visual and semantic wealth. This class uses the city as an area of investigation. It studies the typographic forms and the cultural, social and political dynamics that help to shape this visible language. Considering typography as the visual manifestation of language, while discovering the habits, assumptions and conventions behind typographic surfaces, we will use our findings as starting points to set problems and find creative possibilities to freely experiment with typographic tools. By understanding the relation of typography not only with practiced space but also with language and culture on a broader scale, we will attempt to set up a dialogue with the typographic lexicon and grammar to unfold how typographic communication takes place and its further possibilities.

DIS 513 Innovation by Design: Creating innovation primarily through methods of design stands in contrast to creating innovation primarily through technology. This course is concerned with the first of the two paradigms. We will take a deep dive into the history, art, principles and practice of creating meaningful innovations through design. And we will innovate on the topic itself, push the topic forward. A strong emphasis in this class is on the critical review of existing innovation methods since the 1960s till today. Based on the foundation of this overwhelming amount of methods, principles and processes, in the class we collaboratively identify and build a coherent, modern and sensible framework for innovating through design ourselves.

DIS 514 Sociology of Design and Designing: A Critical Introduction: This course aims to encourage students to think about design and designing as complex social constructs.  Although these concepts became immensely popular lately, a thorough sociological understanding of design and designing is yet to come.  While sociology in general is oblivious to design –with only a few notable exceptions—design researchers who claim to pursue a “social science based” investigation of design lack the canonical knowledge of the extant social science literature.  In this context, this seminar will make a holistic introduction to the relevant theories drawn from design research, science and technology studies and sociology. It will also problematize some of the core conceptions of the design discourse such as “wicked problems” and “design thinking” in the light of a social science-based understanding.

DIS 515 Film, Video and Photography in Contemporary Art: The course will include the parallels between cinema history and the history of new media; the language of cinema and the language of multimedia; the development of montage, its use and the mobile camera in cinema and in new media; the historical ties between new media and the avant-garde film; the technically reproduced image and its forms; vertical and horizontal, linear and non-linear structures; new screen narratives and interactivity.

DIS 516 Ways of Seeing: This course investigates the significance and impact of visual communication through an analysis of material created by different media. It deals with the images as the carriers of valuable information and how they communicate on the basis of semiotic reading through examining how and why we use images to communicate and ways in which images are organized, constructed and manipulated to convey meanings. Throughout the course, looking at and “reading” the visual materials in parallel with the evolution of modern media and their impact on society and culture will be discussed.

DIS 517 Video Sketching for Design: This course aims to provide knowledge and experience on video sketching technique as an alternative to conventional sketching methods. Throughout the course, the students will be given challenging design problems where sketching on paper or monitor will not suffice due to complexity of user interactivity and will be asked to use video sketching technique, which provides an easy and flexible method for user centered design and involve the user in the sketching process. The students are not only expected to learn and improve this particular technique, but also gain perspective and experience on user centered design philosophy.

DIS 518 Design Anthrolology: This course analyses the intersection between anthropology and design. The study of context and user has been increasingly associated with innovative design solutions. The core of this user experience based innovation requires an understanding of culture and its role in the contemporary society. In this course, this understanding is developed in two steps. First, the introduction of core anthropological concepts helps students criticize their role as shapers of contemporary culture. Explorations into historical and contemporary case studies illustrate how culture shapes artifacts and how artifacts transform daily life. Second, brief exercises developed around the application of anthropological research methods on a specific project show student how to enhance their design research abilities.

DIS 519 Design Management and Strategy: This course covers the fundamental aspects of design from a managerial and strategic view, with a strong emphasis on the competitive role of design in global and local markets.

DIS 520 Brand Interaction Strategy: This course aims to provide a comprehensive understanding on the interconnections among user, user experience, product, channel, brand, strategy and design.

DIS 521 Urban Narratives and Spatial Interaction: This course aims to provide the concepts about the urban environment and how it functions on the basis of the interactions that take place in public spaces. Based on the narratives that organized the information in symbolic order, the emerging new type of city will be discussed in response to developing technologies. Throughout the course, the students will examine the relationship with the community, the society and how we relate to our environment based on the narrative aspects of the urban space. The students are expected to explore new kinds of interaction between individuals and urban systems and for the supply of enriched data about site-specific locations.

DIS 522 Political Economy of Design in Turkey: The course aims to interpret industrial design as a function of industrial capitalism. Through several case studies and theoretical readings, the industrial design will be analysed in the context of the center –periphery discussions in the context of global competition. In terms of Turkey, industrial design will be interpreted as part of a cultural and political modernization project and new models will be discussed as the future of design in Turkey.

DIS 523 Concepts and Methods for Designing Interactions: This course covers the issues of key concepts and methods in interaction design; multiple roots of interaction design; interaction concept with connection to industrial design and human-computer interaction field; the research tools and methods that are used in interaction design process user research, paper prototyping and such; terms related with interaction design such as affordances, interfaces and user-friendly; the shift in user-product interactions; disappearing materiality of interaction; the changing role of design and the designer within connection to interaction design; the course also involves hands-on working about the topics throughout the course weeks and creating conceptual projects at the end of the semester.

DIS 524Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation and Innovating Social Change:This course introduces the history, theory and emerging activities of social entrepreneurship/innovation and social change around the world. The course is structured around four elements that are interwoven throughout: 1) Introduction to social entrepreneurship/innovation, 2) management of social entrepreneurial organization, 3) Measuring impact of social entrepreneurship/innovation, 4) Social entrepreneurship in practice. As part of the course, students are part of social innovation project and exposed (through site visits/interviews and guest lecturers) to leading social entrepreneurs looking to engage the class about how to ratchet up social impact. The focus of the course is on Turkey-based organizations but draws insights from other international examples through case studies, videos. 

DIS 525 Praxis is Design Research: This course aims to give a detailed survey of the practice-based design research methods that are used in the academia and industry through applied examples. As such, it also aims to a dynamic interaction and knowledge transfer between academic and practical domains. 

DIS 526 Design Research Practicum: Complementing basic research methods that are used in design research, this course aims to give an applied comprehension of advanced qualitative and qualitative research methods such as cultural probes, visual ethnography, social network analysis and longitudinal data analysis.

DIS 551 The Exhibitionary Complex: In this course various issues of concerning the exhibitionary complex and its consumption, including art galleries, museums and exhibitions, will be analyzed from a socio-historical and critical perspective. It  is an output of intersection of design and society, which continuously restructured by diverse knowledge/power regimes. 

DIS 552 Cultural Heritage and Material Culture: This course is designed to understand the “things” via the interconnections of the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage studies and material/visual culture studies. Recognizing the museums as sites of conflict over representation of cultural heritage, the course will study of material culture in cultural and historical context. 

DIS 553 Media Theory: The course will provide a foundation in the major traditions of media and communication theory, semiotics, mediology, new media, network theory, and digital culture, and will have methodological emphasis in applying interdisciplinary models for investigating media and mediation in their technical and social dimensions. Central topics for study will include the continuum of human symbolic systems, the implications of the expanding pan-digital platform for all media, the analog-digital continuum, the question of "big data" and the collective memory of computational networks, and the ongoing renewal of media content through new technologies of digitization.

DIS 554 Mediators of Spatial Interaction: This object of this course is to make students gain the skills to interpret a story from the perspective of the individual by making use of participative qualities of media and visual and spatial characteristics of scenography. By focusing on making way for personalized making of meaning, the course aims at showing a way to create innovative design for society. Throughout the course, the students will examine the aspects of displaying and exhibiting information using different media in connection with a variety of spatial conditions. The students are expected to understand the dynamics of design in a socially conditioned environment as well as the roots of technology through staging experiences. 

DIS 555 Science, Technology and Visuality: By investigating the reciprocal relationship among science, technology and image production, this class investigates the visuality created at their intersection, and the implications of its cultural and social discourse. For this purpose, the course commences from an historical perspective towards recent technologies of the visual, and via the images enabled and engaged by science and technology, it discusses the systems of representation and the politics of the image along with their components. The class course aims specifically to understand visuality as it relates to contemporary technologies, the processes and perceptions it suggests to designers and thereof to make future projections about the state of the image…

DIS 556 Service Design Theory: This course covers topics related with services design theories; the shift from a manufacturing based industry towards an experience and service based industry; the changing role of design and the designer; diffusion of service design as a discipline and a profession; services as a series of interactions; prototyping service experiences; service design and organizational change; service design and social technology; wicked problems in designing services and future directions for service design research.

DIS 557 Statistical Reasoning for design Research: This course aims to introduce quantitative reasoning, by summarizing the basic concepts of statistics. It covers a variety of introductory topics including probability, data types, empirical distributions, central tendency, covariance, correlation, simple regression, sampling, sampling distributions etc.

DIS 558 Film Theory: The course will be based on the historical development of film, which includes discussions of different film theories, in order to provide students with a greater understanding and appreciation of film as a medium. Each theory will be explained with basic definitions and terms as well as their evolutionary change in time. They will also be supported by basic narratives and exemplary frames from movies to enlighten students on the methods used to deconstruct a film and to show different cinematic techniques/ conventions and their implications.

DIS 559 Critical Reading of History of Design: This course approaches the design in its socio-historical context via a theoretical and practical knowledge. Historical, technological, aesthetic, philosophical, economic and political aspects affecting the appearance of design objects from several periods will be discussed. The materials/technical approach, the comparative method and content analysis will contribute to a critical analysis of history of design.

DIS 560 Independent Studies: Designation of the course depends on the instructor and the content of the course. This course does not have fixed contents. Rather, in coordination with faculty, the student identifies the exact contents (e.g., topics, concepts, fields, theories, methods) to be studied. The student makes a study plan listing these contents, how they will be studied and how they will be used. This study plan needs to be approved by the faculty before the start of the study.

DIS 561 Special Topics in Design: The course focuses on contemporary issues and emerging areas on various topics of design. Through discussions, presentations and lectures by guest speakers from the field, the student has comprehensive knowledge on current debates

DIS 562 Topics in Science, Technology and Society: contemporary issues of the Science, Technology and Society. The course is designed in modules that is determined by the lecturer according to the research areas of the students. Through seminars the lecturer expands the boundaries about the contemporary issues discussed in the field. The student contributes through the weekly presentations and discussion to the discussion.

DIS 565 Crafts in History: In this course, the history of artisanal production by urban craftsmen will be examined from a comparative perspective, with specific focus on the early modern period. A roughly chronological and mainly thematic approach will be maintained in discussion topics. The themes to be visited include, but are not confined with, the methods, sectors and morals of crafts production; early- modern sensibilities on the value of labor; objects of desire, production and consumption patterns in relation to the rise of new urban classes. A comparison of producers of the “east” and “west” will provide a wide range of discussion topics, as well as the opportunity to delve into the reading of (translated) primary historical sources. 

DIS 566 Food and Consumer Behaviours : The course aims to guide the students in learning models for consumer decision processes on food and main theories in communications; analyzing behavior, decision processes and communication units from a consumer perspective for food products, understanding influence processes with the help of alternative perspectives, not only consumers but also food producers and determining food consumption behavior and marketing communications in a finite world - in theory and practice.

DIS 567 Food Culture and History: Students are introduced to the history of food and diet in an international perspective; they recognize the origins of foods, the processes of selection and transformation of foods and also the manner in which they are prepared, served and consumed in a domestic and commercial context from prehistoric/ Neolithic times to contemporary days in Near East, Europe and Asia; recognize the co-evolution of food cultures and technologies through material culture- pots, pans, and utensils; identify the international exchange and spread of foods and food technologies following the voyages of Columbus since Early Modern Era ; and determine the effects of the emergent global economy on food production and consumption since Industrial age until today.

DIS 568 Sensory Analysis and Food Product Development: In this course, students are introduced to the basics of sensory analysis, and they design the sensory experiment required for new product development and analyse the data. They prepare a product development project and apply appropriate sensory tests anduse appropriate tools required for new product development. 

DIS 569 Survey in Food Studies: Multimethod and Interdisciplinary Approaches:  Students are introduced to the field of food studies and to the mechanics of doing interdisciplinary, multimethod research on food. Through discussions of different concepts commonly used in social sciences (food taboos, foodways, migration, competition, power and resistance, state formation, class, habitus, mode of production and relations of production, governmentality, etc.), major works in food studies are explored. Thus, students identify the role food in social and economic relations; they recognize how food consumption and preparation is shaped by various meaning-making mechanisms (culture); they explore how global capitalism and free market economy have shaped the contemporary food production, provisioning and consumption practices; they identify the significance of the state as both a governing-regulating and an economic actor vis-à-vis food and agriculture.

DIS 527 Interdisciplinarity Design Lab: Interdisciplinarity has been promoted as a tool for developing innovative solutions. This quality makes interdisciplinarity an important component of contemporary design practice. As a result, the knowledge exchange within interdisciplinary teams, the dynamics of teamwork, the changing nature of design process has been discussed in relation to interdisciplinary design projects. This course also covers these contemporary issues within the intersection of design and interdisciplinarity. The lectures focus on interdisciplinarity in design from different perspectives. Students practice and experience interdisciplinary design process through the development of projects.