Interaction Design Education Summit 2016

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.

In Participatory Design approaches, Design Games (DGs) are becoming a popular technique. Through games, designers and users can interact in a relaxed atmosphere that contributes to empathic understanding. In interaction design education, DGs have been presented as tools that help students develop skills such as organizing collaboration and reflecting about their own practice as designers. However, the possibilities of DGs in education are larger than this. In this presentation, Eva Durall and Heidi Uppa show two examples of how DGs help define the design space and develop common understanding and reflection between designers and end-users. These examples of how DGs are used show how DGs are a powerful tool not only in learning contexts but also as part of a professional interaction design practice.

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.