DIY IAP: Say it with a Photo Essay

Each fall, freshmen involved with the Discover Product Design (DPD) pre-orientation program document their weeklong class experience—of campus lab tours, visits to design firms, and various design exercises and activities—with photo essays. These are intended to teach basic photography, but DPD also shows students how to document work for a design portfolio and conduct ethnographic research for understanding existing behavior to inform the design process.

Take a look at the gallery of each student's top three photos. During the week, they designed a product for their dorm room (created on a laser cutter in thin acrylic), created posters to encourage student life, and disassembled existing products to learn how they are manufactured.

DPD is run by members of the MIT Ideation Lab, a mechanical engineering research group studying early-stage design processes. Check out some of the designs from the 2010 program.

Want to create your own photo essay? Check out Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry on OpenCourseWare for instruction (including videos) and inspiration, especially the student image galleries that explore things like light, significant detail, and landscape poetics.