Design Fundamentals - NID's First Online Course

Category: UX | Information Design | Brand design
Guide: Rupesh Vyas
Duration: 6 months

Check out the course here: https://node.nid.edu/learn

With an agenda to democratize world-class design education across India, National Institute of Design (NID) launched NODE – NID Online Design Education.

Through this medium, students anywhere in the world can access design instruction from world-renowned NID faculty and design professionals.

With the booming of design in India, there still is unawareness about design and design education hampering a holistic view, due to lack of resources. With an aim to bridge this gap NID launched its first online course on ‘Design Fundamentals’.

My role in the project was to set the user experience for the ‘Design Fundamentals’ package course, develope its content, representation of the content and its strategy, creative visualization and marketing design.

The project began with primary research which included – studying about online education- its possibilities and limitations, competitive analysis, understanding the target audience, their intellectual capacity, time schedule, attention span, understanding the medium in context of the target audience.

The secondary research included course content collection by studying the modules taught in foundation program at various national and international design colleges, broad topics (modules) to be covered, collecting course content and exercises.

The data collected was analyzed, filtering information according to the target audience. Exercise and demonstrations were examined and sorted. Later all the information was structured to form the informtaion architecture. For devicing the correct UX, NODE was personified and is personifications were applied to its various touch points.

There were three broad domains determining the UX of the video-

1. Visual- setting the mood for the background, setting of the lecture + demo video, position and stance of the speaker, visuals to be included accommodating the content.

2. Sound – Background music, its tone and mood, pitch and balance, genre of the music

3. Content delivery style

After planning the strategies for the UX of the video, faculties were enlisted according to the content requirement and were requested to share and contribute their knowledge.

A set of basic questions were also made on core topics according to their expertise.

I gave 29 lectures on the following topics- elements of drawing, observing patterns, form, form and surface, colour, composition, colour and composition and geometry. Besides the lectures 19 demonstration videos were recorded to guide the learners for the assignments given. The content was substantiated with examples that are present in our day-to-day life to make them understand in a better way.