Overview of Design Aesthetics

Design Aesthetics is a four credit hours course offered to all Bachelor of Design students in UPSI. It is a core course, meaning that the students have to score at least C or 50% of the total course marks in order to pass. Else the students must repeat the course. The course has four intended learning outcomes:

1. To explain the principles and the appreciation of beauty in the form of arts. 
2. To relate the issues to do with the varieties form of traditional art and modern art which includes the visual arts, music and performing arts from various culture. 
3. To demonstrate and formulate the concept of beauty based on certain principles, system and techniques, concept and certain criteria. 
4. To analyse and criticise the aspects contained in art forms which would be learned according to robust verbal and written arguments and evidence.

This course is mainly conducted in English language. However, Malay, Chinese and other languages might be used to explain concepts that possess specific lingual and cultural background. 

How I turn up teaching this course?

To be honest, I never taught I am the right person to teach Design Aesthetics. I still remembered in one Department of Creative Multimedia meeting, lecturers of the department were discussing who to teach what course in 2011/2012 academic year which began in Sep 2011. I noticed that Design Aesthetics would be taught by Prof. Dato' Dr. Ahmad bin Hj Zainuddin, the Dean of the Facutly of Art, Computing and Creative Industry, who is also the Chairperson of Malaysia Design Council. I was curious with what the course is about and how the Dean would teach it. However, as the course's teaching load exceeded the Dean's allocation, I volunteered to co-teach the course. Nonetheless, it turned out to be I had to teach the course all by myself. The outcome was really shocking but I took it as a challenge. 

First of all, I constructed an instructional plan (Rancangan Instruksi) based on the approved course structure and then discussed the plan with the Dean and Prof. Dato' Najib, the former Director of National Visual Art Galley. Both of them taught that the original course structure is too "traditional" and fine art oriented. I revised the plan and finally endorsed by them. After that, I spent quite a lot of time reading and preparing for the course, in order to face the teaching challenge.