{"id":4678,"date":"2024-12-18T10:13:48","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T15:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=4678"},"modified":"2024-12-18T14:50:57","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T19:50:57","slug":"daedalus-lead-designers-on-teaching-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=4678","title":{"rendered":"Daedalus Lead Designers on Teaching and Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Daedalus, based in the heart of Pittsburgh, is just down the road from Carnegie Mellon University. With several CMU graduates on our team, we\u2019re grateful to be closely connected not just in distance, but also professionally to such a powerhouse of research, design, and engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew Sass and Chris Stygar are both Lead Designers at Daedalus and have a wide range of responsibilities, including design, engineering, model making, project management, and training others. Both have been with Daedalus for over 25 years and have also served as educators at CMU.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We sat down with Matthew and Chris to discuss how their experience as practitioners of design has influenced their teaching approaches and how teaching has influenced their work as professional designers.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Staying sharp by asking \u201cwhy\u201d and \u201chow\u201d<\/span><\/h3>\n

Matthew Sass has been an Adjunct Faculty member at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University for 20 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew teaches two classes at CMU each year: an introductory class to computer-aided design (CAD) and digital prototyping, and an advanced CAD and rendering techniques class. In his introductory class, he teaches undergraduate design students who have not yet picked a specialty, so his goal is to teach them the concepts and intuition behind how industrial and product designers make their products. In his advanced class, he works with industrial and product designers-in-training and trains them in professional-level tools to help them build out their portfolios.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For Matthew, over the years as he\u2019s honed his craft, he\u2019s found that teaching is a great way to stay in touch with a younger perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still nice to stay in touch with what other designers, up-and-comers are interested in, or what their perspectives are,\u201d Matthew said. \u201cIt prevents me from getting isolated or detached.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The responsibility of teaching students at different levels has also helped Matthew to up his game as a designer. For Matthew, teaching is a gateway to deeper understanding, and that teachers must strive to know their subject matter well.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s \u201cthis idea that if you\u2019re going to teach something to someone, you have to really know what you\u2019re doing,\u201d Matthew said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy domain of expertise has forced me to really have to explicitly elevate all of the things that I know about,\u201d Matthew said. \u201cThe \u2018why\u2019s\u2019 and the \u2018how.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStudents, especially beginners, are really good at asking questions or stumbling upon things that are really unexpected. In order to be able to deal with those things, a teacher, an instructor has to have an answer for everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou got to stay sharp.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Providing tangible experience<\/span><\/h3>\n

Chris Stygar served as the Director of the 3D Lab at the CMU School of Design for 7 years in between his stints at Daedalus.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As 3D Lab Director, Chris managed the operations of the laboratory, which contains analog and digital production equipment, a machine room, soldering benches, a spray painting booth, and more. He managed staff and trained undergraduate and graduate students, especially those who were not experts in product design to begin with, in how to use the lab\u2019s tools.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris brought his experience at Daedalus helping clients turn their ideas for products into a reality to his work as a teacher and mentor for students at CMU. Most of the students Chris interacted with had never developed a product before.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what we do at Daedalus,\u201d Chris said. “But it\u2019s not something that you run across every day.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s lots of trade-offs that come up when you’re making those steps from \u2018imagined\u2019 to \u2018a reality,\u2019\u201d Chris said. \u201cAnd that can be daunting.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Teaching students how to organize their ideas and recognize those tradeoffs is a big part of teaching them how to have design intent. Students might be just getting exposed to an idea, and to sit with them and develop the idea, break it down into concrete steps is a process Chris is very familiar with from his client work at Daedalus.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlright, if I do it this way, it means I\u2019m going to have to do A, B or C, and my results will get me E, F, G,\u201d Chris said. \u201cAnd if I do it this way, I\u2019ll have different challenges and different benefits that come out of them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Images
Images from CMU Design’s “Prototyping Studio Safety Saw Test”<\/a> featuring class demonstration by Chris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With clear and effective communication, Chris has seen many students (and clients) through the whole product development process. \u201cThe excitement is palpable,\u201d he said, as students start to zero in on what they want to create.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of students these days don\u2019t come to school with a lot of \u2018hand skills,\u2019 which is what I call \u2018how to make things,\u2019 because a lot of the programs have been dropped in high school,\u201d Chris said. \u201cSo when they first get the chance to <\/span>make<\/span><\/i> something that is a thing and it looks good, it\u2019s terribly exciting for some people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a great thing to be able to help someone do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Inspiring the next generation of designers<\/span><\/h3>\n

Design and teaching are intertwined. In order to dream up a vision that will solve problems in an elegant, purposeful, and intuitive way, you must both teach yourself about this product\u2019s audience and enable the end user to teach themselves while using it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to teach, you must understand the gap between where your students are now and where they need to go, choose the best route to get them there, and make that route feel reliable enough that students are motivated to keep going.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’re proud to have Matthew and Chris as part of both Daedalus and our broader design community as they inspire the next generation of designers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Daedalus, based in the heart of Pittsburgh, is just down the road from Carnegie Mellon University. With several CMU graduates on our team, we\u2019re grateful to be closely connected …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[221,181],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nDaedalus Lead Designers on Teaching and Design - daed.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We sat down with Matthew and Chris to discuss how their experience as practitioners of design has influenced their teaching approaches, and how teaching has influenced their work as professional designers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=4678\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daedalus Lead Designers on Teaching and Design - 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