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Keene State College Catalog information
SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN AND INNOVATION
Bachelor of Science
The Sustainable Product Design and Innovation major at Keene State College is a pre-professional four-year program offering a cross-disciplinary curriculum to give the student a solid foundation in the artistic, scientific, and technical aspects of product design and the social and scientific aspects of sustainability concerns. [...]
As a Professor in the Technology Design and Safety Department, I have been instructing TDS 160 Introduction to Power and Energy continuously since my appointment in 1978. Based largely on my doctoral work at Umass-Amherst (national energy policy, energy conservation, renewable sources), I radically revised the course content over the years to meet TDS programmatic changes. This course has evolved from its Industrial Arts teacher-training roots with in-depth training in the narrow field of mechanics (small engine/auto mechanics; hydraulics, pneumatics) to an orientation to energy systems as they apply to the commercial/industrial, residential and transportation sectors. In the last decade I have worked consciously to develop this course as an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary exploration of how local initiatives can remedy the problematic combination of flawed federal energy planning and international energy corporate control. To encourage students to apply creative problem-solving strategies to unstructured problems related to local energy issues, I employ a Problem-Based Service Learning or PBSL project (involving local non-profit agencies) that serves as the ‘final examination.”
The course most recently served as a TDS elective in the Technology Studies major and as an open elective that consistently attracted students campus wide — Technology (Product Design and Development), Architecture, Environmental Studies, Computer, Education, Mathematics, Safety, science and social science degree candidates, as well as students pursuing transfer to engineering schools.
[refer to attached Appendix: Rationale, Student Outcomes II, Service Learning, Assessment and Texts for more background]
As a Professor in Technology Design and Safety, I previously had been teaching the social science interdisciplinary course IDSS 150 Technology and Civilization on a regular basis since 2000. Political Science Professor Chuck Weed and I developed and team-taught the pilot course that fall. We based our collaboration on our work together at an Antioch Graduate School seminar for faculty in higher education offered earlier that summer. The weeklong experience was designed to bring faculty from different disciplines together to design interdisciplinary courses. Chuck and I completely overhauled an existing interdisciplinary course that I had taught intermittently in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when it was listed under the “Liberal Studies” prefix as LS 205 Technology and Civilization. Dr. Robert Andrews developed the original course in the early 1980’s.
We had a great time working with the first group of students that fall, and we found ourselves endlessly amending the original challenges (individual and group student assignments), editing content and fine-tuning assessment tools. Unfortunately, department/discipline demands prevented us from repeating our experiment, but fortunately, student feedback and the match of the course content with the needs of TDS majors in Architecture, Technology (Product Design & Development) and Safety encouraged me to offer IDSS 150 at least once a semester.
The range of student research in IDSS 150 over the previous seven years reinforced my intuition that II-TDS 150 would most appropriately be offered as an ISP-Interdisciplinary course as opposed to a Perspectives offering. I have found that the subject content of IDSS 150 had outstripped its social science parameters as students assessed the impact of technical solutions from a wide range of perspectives and their research projects required them to explore solutions based on a multiple of disciplines from the arts and humanities and the from the “hard sciences” — from biology to physics and chemistry.
[refer to attached Appendix: Rationale, Student Outcomes II, Service Learning, Assessment and Texts for more background]
As the “graphic arts” and visual communications instructor in the TDS Department since the early 1980’s, I have been teaching TDS 140 Introduction to Visual Communications as either the orientation/gateway course to the TDS-sponsored Graphic Design major (1986- 1998) or a core course to the trio of TDS majors (Safety, Architecture, Technology Studies). I have worked consciously over the years to develop this course as an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary exploration of visual communications (the integration of the digital revolution with traditional print media; the application of computer-generated text, artwork, photography to presentation media; visual literacy; marketing and promotion) and application of creative problem-solving strategies to unstructured problems (Problem-Based Service Learning or PBSL projects involving local non-profit agencies).
[refer to attached Appendix: Rationale, Student Outcomes II, Service Learning, Assessment and Texts for more background]
The faculty members proposing this course are both members of the Keene State College Integrative Studies Program Committee and are enthusiastic about developing new pedagogies that reach across their respective disciplinary boundaries. As noted under the course objectives above: this experimental course will seek to engage students in a challenging learning environment that will develop the skills necessary to effectively participate as a member of society when faced with complex multi-disciplinary challenges. The course is proposed as an upper-level interdisciplinary course as it will require foundational skills expected of all advanced students and will seek to develop deeper multi-disciplinary learning and advanced individual skills for all participants.