Design education is in need of a wider restructuring to accommodate new developments and paradigmatic shifts brought forth by the information age, all of which capitalise a move towards complexity theory, systems science and digital technologies. The intention of this article is to approach one particular aspect of this need: that is, how basic design education can be reconsidered to establish the arguably broken link between the ‘learning by doing’ tradition of a Bauhaus‐oriented basic design education with the computational and parametric logic necessitated by contemporary design technologies. The authors present the overall outlines of a basic design course as offered in Beykent University Department of Industrial Design in Istanbul, Turkey. The programme consists of a series of exercises grouped in five modules and two ‘binders’ that are structured to link the fundamental notions and operations of design thinking covered in basic design courses of the first year with the analytical and computational‐reasoning competencies that are developed mostly in the later years of design education.