Towards new sources for industrial product design curriculum: Collectivism and social network

Design education is an open platform where new approaches can be implemented due to the experimental nature of design. This paper includes two separate projects whose common ideas are experimentalism and up-to-dateness. They were conducted in the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Technical University. Each section covers one project including related concepts and terms, description of the process, outcomes and discussion. First section stresses a collective design activity conducted in Basic Design course. Second one discusses a newly introduced method of developing personas by using a social network website. Hence, this paper reporting and analyzing these projects and their results can be considered as a prospect; and inspiration and source for the future studies in design education.