This course investigates the stages of design thinking, from conducting research and defining a brief to ideating and prototyping design solutions. Students exercise this process through both team and individual pitches. Students learn how research, root-cause analysis, and user testing can help guide and evaluate their design and content strategies. Additionally, they gain a deeper understanding of the key principles in user experience (UX), human-centric design, and designing for conversion. In the process, we think about questions such as: What is design? What informs our design decisions? How does design synthesize and contextualize ideas into effective communication? Whether you want to think about how design can support a cause, establish a brand, motivate interaction, remediate aesthetics or kickstart a totally new media project, this introduction to design methodology provides the foundational tools to help you to reach your goals. Over the semester, students develop design solutions to gain insights and expertise in addressing issues of content creation, user interactions, collaboration, media platforms, prototypes, and presentations. Case studies, theoretical readings, experiments, guest lectures, and critiques of student work inform our design approaches. This course may count as the three (3) credits of Media Methods requirement or as a seminar. While this is not a production course, familiarity with an area of media production is recommended.