In This Industrial Design Class, Students Eat Their Homework

The Rhode Island School of Design uses recipes to teach the trial-and-error process of tweaking and refining a product.

From the first meeting of the industrial design class he took this fall, Zhiye Lin knew he was at a disadvantage. The other 10 students were experienced cooks. Mr. Lin was not.

“I basically started from zero,” he said.

This might have hurt his grade in a cooking class, but not in this one, at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I. Called Designing Food, the course asks students to choose recipes at the start of the semester that they will cook, share with the class, and cook again. And again. And again. With each new try, they’ll make changes as they pursue their own ideal version of the dish.

The point is not to learn how to barbecue char siu pork or laminate pastry dough, although some students did those things. The goal is to understand iterative design, a method of improving products through repeated cycles of testing and tweaking. In other words, Designing Food is one of the rare college classes where you really can get credit for being the most improved.

Erica Pernice, who has been teaching the course since 2021, said that by focusing on simple recipes that can be cooked in a few hours or less, the students can work through four or five iterations in a semester. This wouldn’t be possible if they were designing, say, an electric car.

“We never had enough time to do that properly in school,” said Ms. Pernice, who graduated from the school in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. “You get out into world and discover the process is much longer.”