Spring 2026 Product Design Electives
The Department of Product Design's Spring 2026 elective offerings explore the development of educational toys and communication with AI tools for design. Full course details are listed below.
A Modern Fröbel: Toys for Learning
Tuesdays/Thursdays 3:30 - 4:45 p.m. | Instructor: Carly Hagins
Friedrich Fröbel, the founder of kindergarten, believed that play is the foundation of learning. To nurture this idea, he created “Fröbel’s Gifts”—a series of carefully designed toys that encouraged discovery, creativity, and collaboration between children and teachers. In this elective course, we will trace the history of kindergarten and its material culture, explore contemporary approaches to educational toys, and design and fabricate our own tools for open-ended play.
Design, AI and Communication
Tuesdays/Thursdays 3:30 - 4:45 p.m. | Instructor: SK O'Brien
When we communicate with AI to design, we are not coding or commanding — we are conversing. We describe insights, ideas, moods, textures, and emotions in words, and the machine translates them into forms, colors, and structures. A prompt becomes a design brief; a sentence becomes a visual. In this course, we will explore how our words are translated by artificial intelligence and grow our understanding of the best ways to utilize this ever-evolving tool. Then, we will focus on how we can best communicate our work product to humans through a series of brief exercises culminating in a final project building a portfolio website using only the written word.