Developing a sustainable design practice means having a grounding in design theory, studio, and history. These elements can be difficult to balance and integrate in a college program, let alone in a short professional workshop, but their importance cannot be understated.
A solid grounding in shared foundations can help students develop a deep practice and shared understanding, and help an institution develop a lasting school of thought that is carried on by their students in their future work.
This session will explore a method of teaching that has been tested at both the college and professional development levels that integrates all of these elements into a rich foundation program for Interaction Design. We will discuss specific instruction methods, class structure, activities and assignments, and types of material that have been used to build successful Interaction Design courses varying in length from one day to a full semester.
Career change is not something undertaken lightly. There are many emotions wrapped up in the process—uncertainty, anxiety, doubt. Students come to professional development courses like General Assembly’s because they need help and support to reach their career goals. Instructors join because they find it gratifying to help these students grow as designers.
What happens when all those instructors have to redirect their efforts to lesson planning, because the curriculum is too bare bones? Students have wildly inconsistent experiences, and the barrier to entry for new instructors becomes very high. It becomes harder for everyone involved to succeed. How might we redesign the student experience to better reflect the experience of working as an interaction designer? Is there a way to better equip all instructors for success?
Jessica Greco will share how she redesigned General Assembly’s part-time User Experience Design course curriculum to reflect significant changes in context for both students and instructors, and the lessons she learned along the way.
As interaction design broadens to include a host of disciplines in order to approach situations holistically and from a design-centric approach, a question has arisen as to how these “non-designers” learn designerly ways to thinking and working. I have developed a meta-curricular set of “design dispositions” which I believe not only bridge design’s many disciplines but serve as guiding ideals for those who participate in contemporary design practice. This talk can be of benefit to those who teach design to future designers, those who teach design to people outside of our discipline (particularly to technologists), to students at a university level, corporate or continuing education, or even in grade school.
The wide range of new interactive screen based form factors and digital products continue to transform the requirements and expectations of the user experience designer. Today’s designers must incorporate project planning, user research, creativity, visual design and technical knowledge into their portfolio. To prepare students for this challenge the New Media Design, Bachelor of Fine Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology has created a rigorous 4 year interdisciplinary degree program. While maintaining a strong core creative and visual design curriculum the New Media Design program incorporates collaborative courses from the Bachelor of Sciences in New Media Development and supports the Liberal Arts Digital Humanities and Web and Mobile Development programs. These unique interdisciplinary curricular relationships along with robust industry participation with companies like Adobe, Effective UI, Kodak and Xerox create a learning environment that prepares students for jobs across the UX landscape. Through curriculum exploration, project based education examples and collaborative industry relationships this presentation will explore the academic program design, teaching processes and student experience developed for creative visual and user experience designers.
The forest aInteraction design and service design have a lot in common. They both focus on improving the experience of people in real-world contexts and they depend on each other to design a complete experience. After all, a service experience is often a sequence of interactions that a person has with artifacts or other people. Interaction designers can learn a lot about their craft by studying the process and methods of service design. After all, what happens before and after a person uses a website can impact the overall quality of their experience just as much, if not more, than specific interface design elements or the physical quality of animations on screen. In this presentation, Aaron Ganci provides an in-depth case study on the curricular use of service design processes and methods to help interaction design students understand their own work. Details about the course structure, assignments and outcomes, and insights on the use of this methodology will all be discussed.nd its trees: understanding interaction design through service design activities.
In this presentation, Charles Hannon presents a model for undergraduate IxD education that appeals to Millennial students’ desire for hands-on learning methods and for academic work that has visible community impact. This is a two-course sequence in which IxD methods are taught in the fall and then implemented in the spring through a community service project. The second course functions as a capstone for students in an interdisciplinary computing and information studies major.
Few students begin the sequence with specific interests in human-centered design; clients, usually nonprofit agency directors, typically require coaching to understand their I.T. design challenges and the tools available to address them. The program thus places undergraduates with little formal design experience into positions where they help community organizers with real needs and limited resources.
Co-presenter and program graduate Jacqueline Bytnar will share her story as an example. She'll discuss how her experience with a public library redesign project in 2010 shaped her subsequent marketing & design career.
Regardless of education or training, the vast majority of interaction designers start their career unprepared to design their portfolio, a key document that will allow them to fully manage their career. In this talk, Ian Fenn reveals what students struggle with and how educators like you can help.
Over the past two decades, new technologies shifted what Interaction Design (IxD) students need to learn for professional practice. In the mid-nineties, IxD education covered interface design and web design to the plethora of topics currently explored today, such as, sensor networks, smart environments, smart cities, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality Interfaces, and so forth.
To keep IxD university programs relevant, educators seek new ways for students to learn to design in emergent areas such as: larger scale environments (e.g., smart environments, Internet of Things, augmented reality interfaces). New technologies and design opportunities often require new design and prototyping methods.
Join Peter Scupelli and Austin Lee as they share lessons learned teaching interaction design at an environments scale to undergraduate design students in the Environments Track at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. They'll show how they teach students how to use standard IxD methods in designing for digital, physical, hybrid, and room-sized environments.
Leading up to Cooper’s first public classes, there was a huge internal debate that these classes would be giving away our secrets, and instead of hiring us as consultants, in-house teams would take our hard-earned, time-tested processes and techniques do the work themselves. Turns out, that wasn’t the case. In fact, teaching has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Today, training and mentoring is a big part of our work.
In this talk, Dan and Kendra will share why Cooper includes training and mentoring as part of many design projects and show how you can be generous with your skills.
Here are some of the topics they'll cover:
+ Why training workshops are a natural compliment to consulting work
+ How training can foster cross-team collaboration (and builds buy-in for your work)
+ How the combination of training and consulting builds capable (not codependent) design teams that come back
In the end, attendees will walk away knowing how to use training and mentoring as part of ayour design practice, as a consultant or in-house team.
How might we best educate designers and build educational capacity within an enterprise setting?
Enterprises around the world face a common problem: A severe shortage of interaction designers.
Formal design programs do not have the capacity to graduate enough students to meet industry demand. Industry is largely unprepared or unable to educate interaction designers on the job.
Enterprises must take a lead role in building educational capacity within organizations as part of the solution.
This workshop aims to answer the question and address the problem.
Participants will:
- Contribute to the body of knowledge and community of practice for our field
- Learn and practice a proven toolkit of facilitation methods for strategic change, analysis, and decision-making in complex multi-stakeholder environments like the enterprise.
Outcomes
1. An open-source education resource of models, frameworks, and methods for the community to adopt, iterate, and evolve
2. Participants will learn strategic facilitation methods that they can apply immediately upon returning to their workplaces.
The role of the designer is changing.
Designers are creating new roles for themselves, in response to new questions society and industry are facing. Designers are being taken more seriously by the tech industry than ever before; twenty seven startups that were co-founded by designers have been acquired since 2010 by companies like Google, Facebook, Adobe, Linkedin, Dropbox and Yahoo. Design is becoming more and more commonplace on the curriculum of world leading business schools such as Stanford, Harvard and Yale. Most importantly, the development of experiences and services is at the core of these changes and design thinking is often the method used to build solutions.
And yet, at the height of our demand the quality of our supply is challenged. Jonny Ive famously said that design education is "tragic." How can we turn this around?
Our workshop will dig into this issue, exploring the experiences of participants by asking key questions about their work and their learning. Grappling with questions that matter such as:
• How do you teach systems thinking?
• What does the designer as unicorn trend mean for education?
• Why are tech companies acquiring design agencies? How are we teaching future designers how to collaborate with engineers in light of this?
• What are you learning and how are you learning it?
• How can educators partner with industry to better prepare students for the workplace?
This will be a hands on workshop prototyping alternative futures for both design education and creative industries. Lauren and Daniel invite you to join them in tackling our communities biggest design challenge yet: how do we design designers?
The Interaction Design Living Archive (IxDLA) is envisioned to be IxDA’s free digital repository of educational content, indexed, cross-referenced and historically contextualized, with a year over year lens on the emergent practice of professional interaction design. For the past twelve years, IxDA has been at the center of this rapidly changing design discipline -- its archives are a living collection of community conversation, thought leadership and exemplary work. In harmony with IxDA’s mission to improve the human condition by advancing the discipline of interaction design, the IxDLA will provide unprecedented information access for students, educators, career-changers, technologists, business and civic leaders, and design practitioners of all levels. The IxDLA will aggregate now disparate content such as audio and video recordings, photography, articles and publications, presentation materials, commentary, social media, and more. This working session will explore use cases and concept design to ensure the needs of educators and students are at the core of the emergent IxDLA.
Dynamic aesthetics are essential to teach to interaction design students, because of its impact on meaning and value of the experience. In this workshop we develop strategies to engage students into the practice of designing interactions that lead to the desired aesthetics.
This workshop aims to identify the current state of aesthetic interaction and recent work, discover multiple methods for learning this approach towards interaction design, prototype and test several proposed methods, and reflect on the experiences and outcome.
While technology is an essential and integrated aspect of our lives and while accessible and customizable open-source products (such as Arduino) make it possible for designers to grasp technology into the development of the next big things, there is still a gap to reach in terms of preliminary stages of the design process: sketching (with technology), within technology education in the design school setting. There is no consistency in how to educate design school students on technology, to make them use it in the design process itself, especially electronics and physical computing sketching and rapid prototyping in order to develop non-screen interactions (wearables and IoT courses).
Teaching: hands-on learning and practice these, is based on problem-focused processes aka analytic thinking, which design students might not be used to. Design students sometimes end up feel limited by technology: a kit they practiced with, a language they were taught or process; and/or would choose to *design* technology, rather practically challenge it, to its boundaries and limitations: work with technology as a raw material.
Part of it has to do with the way these subjects are being taught and the need to find a way to make them accessible for designers as other tools and materials they use to sketch their ideas. At the same time, there are more and more makers communities and opportunities (such as hackathons), and we see more and more designers taking advantages upon these. Thus, I suggest to find ways to teach *making* and build curriculums which are based on the makers-thinking, that will reflect what makers do: using traditional processes on new and smart materials, use traditional materials in new and advanced processes, creatively think of ways to combine and question tools, processes, techniques and materials to solve a problem or define a new one.