Minors for School of Design

Service design encompasses planning and organizing people, infrastructure and communication of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service Design enables organizations to create better services and value for users by understanding and refining their experiences across the different stages of a service. It also ensures value to the service providers by optimizing their back-end operations. The course will enable in-depth learning of various methods in service design while practically applying them to specific design challenges with an objective to ensure exhaustive understanding of what service design is and its application in the practical context. Upon completion, the student will have a better understanding of service design theory, essential methods such as customer journey mapping, design research, application of ideation and prototyping in design of services, tools such as service blueprints.

UPES School of Design’s Psychology minor program enables students the study of human health and behavior and their correlation to the design of products and services. Students explore a range of topics including cognition and language, sensation and perception, memory, personality, intelligence, health, stressand psychological disorders. Also covered are various research methods, historical trends and theories, critical analysis used in contemporary psychology. Upon completion, the student will be able to understand human behavior and functioning from a psychological theory perspective, understanding individual and group behavior, know how to identify, describe and critically analyze the major theoretical approaches in historical and current psychological works. Describe major influences on an individual’s psychological development across the lifespan such as negative environmental conditions, internal drives, social influence, stress/coping mechanisms, and psychological disorders among others.

UPES School of Design’s Film & Video Communication minor program will educate and train students in concept development and production of films across educational, cultural, social, entertainment, marketing communication needs, among others. The course will see students understand and learn the foundation of basic visual communication skills, further continuing to the theoretical as well as technical aspects of filmmaking using state of the art equipment and labs available at the school. A combination of theory, projects and masterclasses will lead to holistic conceptual along with production capabilities.

UPES School of Design’s Social Impact Design minor program studies the contribution of design and creative thinking for the society welfare, such as plastic recycling in the home, designing solutions for educating people with disabilities, refugee integration through sports, promoting ethical consumer choices, designing inclusive clothing among others . The course educates and equips students with critical thinking, practical and soft skills to successfully lead design projects that will bring positive societal changes. Students work with faculty and partner organizations to research and design a solution to a societal problem that they have identified. Upon completion, the students are expected to have developed problem-solving skills (design thinking, social entrepreneurship, ethical reasoning, leadership, prototyping) and develop a design solution that can be tested and implemented.

UPES School of Design’s Robotics minor program will introduce students to the basic concepts of Robotics and how it can be better adapted to human needs through Design. This course will provide an overview of robot mechanisms, dynamics, and intelligent controls and involve students in the development, building and programming of line follower robot. While developing the robot students will learn the fundamentals of basic electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Students will work in a state of the art research environment, guided by acclaimed faculties and mentors for conducting cutting-edge service and cognitive robotics research. There will also be opportunities to take part in robotics competitions offering invaluable opportunities for exciting and highly formative, practical sessions of intense study.

UPES School of Design’s Accessory Design minor program address the entire spectrum of accessories and lifestyle products, precious and costume jewelry, leather goods, footwear, watches, giftware, tableware, silverware, other lifestyle products, and visual merchandising. The course involves exploring, processing and experimenting with thoughts, concepts & materials in order to establish a platform for new ideas. The course adopts a combination of teaching approaches including lectures, Projects (studio, live & collaborative), group work, field trips (traditional & contemporary), Self-study, Presentations & reflections. Students are absorbed in traditional craft techniques as well as the use of new age digital tools. Upon completion, the student will have in-depth practical and theoretical knowledge of the accessory design process and a clear understanding of the broader cultural and social context of design.

UPES School of Design’s Exhibition Design minor program develops creative thinking and design exploration ability in students to shape storytelling experiences across multiple exhibition venues such as staging of representative and experiential spaces; interior-design environments and scenography for festivities; museums, galleries and trade exhibitions; and cultural and theatrical events. Upon completion of the course, which involves a rigorous combination of theory by industry experts, hands on workshops and live projects, the student will acquire thorough knowledge in spatial planning, image manipulation, narrative, color, lighting, and multimedia, and working knowledge of structures, typography, combined with an understanding of audience and human factors.

UPES School of Design’s Immersive Media Design minor program deals with the core technologies across merging disciplines of all creative expressions, which will form future means of interacting. With new technological interventions, one can notice its impact in day-to-day life. Such technological interventions deeply influence current design practices. Using technologies like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, using micro sensory with IoT, Gestural, Voice recognition and Haptics, students will learn to transform data into meaningful social and emotional communication. It will explore the human side of futuristic immersive design with related technologies and interactions with emerging media in focus to understand the compelling user engagement in fields ranging from education, health, social communication; art, performing arts; entertainment, events; branding, spatial installations; simulations and business.

UPES School of Design’s minor program in Artificial Intelligence, which has emerged as an increasingly impactful discipline in science and technology covers statistics, Python, machine learning, deep learning networks, NLP, and reinforcement learning. The student will build and deploy deep learning models on the cloud using AWS SageMaker, work on voice assistance devices, build Alexa skills, and gain access to GPU-enabled labs. AI applications are embedded in the infrastructure of many products and industries search engines, medical diagnoses, speech recognition, robot control, web search, advertising and even toys. There is an important role that designers play in Artificial Intelligence, specially humanizing technology.