Course Instructor: Dori Tunstall, Ph.D.
Meeting Day and Time: Mondays 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Location CUPPA, 400 South Peoria Street, 2nd Floor Room 2115
Email: etunst@uic.edu
Phone: 312.282.2893 (Emergency only)

Course Description:

 What does it mean to be human?
    What role does art and design play in defining humanness?
 How does shifting definitions of humanness impact art and design?

These are the fundamental questions that are addressed in the Design Anthropology seminar. The course is divided into four sections based the four fields of the Anthropology discipline:

The first section (Weeks 3-5): Physical Anthropology and how the unique features of the human body as it impacts the creation of products and built environments.

The second section (Weeks 6-9): Archaeology and how the creation, destruction, storage, and distribution of material objects exposes the role of design in shaping human history.

The third section (Weeks 10-13): Linguistics and how humans determine what is a message, its form, and its meaning.

The fourth section (Weeks 14-16): Socio-Cultural Anthropology and how the values and meaning different cultures attribute to design impact the definitions of creativity and innovation.

The learning objectives of the course are to:

1) provide students with a holistic conceptual framework to ground their design practices,
2)challenge assumptions about universal design principles,
3) delineate the processes of design as a general human activity and a specialized practice, and
4) expose students to how a deeper understanding of humanness can enhance their design activities.