about this website

On the subject of assignments in design education

The mission of this website is to collect briefs and exercises for design students.

The objective is to help teachers come up with new ideas, evaluate what assignments work best and what can be improved, and provide a repository of ready-to-use concepts.

In the words of Paul Rand (Design and the Play Instinct, 1965):

I believe that if, in the statement of a problem, undue emphasis is placed on freedom and self-expression, the result is apt to be an indifferent student and a meaningless solution.

Conversely, a problem with defined limits, with an implied or stated discipline (system of rules) that in turn is conducive to the instinct of play, will most likely yield an interested student and, very often, a meaningful and novel solution.

Credits

The idea of this website was initiated in 2018 by Manuel Schmalstieg through discussions with his colleagues (Adrien Cater, Christian Tännler, Aurélie Camuset, Livia Gnos, and others) at Eracom, Lausanne.

References

Technical details

For more information on the architecture of this website, and to obtain the source code, check out this README on Github.

Typography

The typeface used on this website? It’s Glacial Indifference, by Alfredo Marco Pradil. I created a plugin to use it with WordPress.