The undergraduate aspect of this is the toughest. My degree was a BFA in graphic design (which I think is easier to grasp) but we didn't even _start_ the actual design classes until the 2nd year. The first year was focused on foundation courses in drawing and basic two- and three-dimensional form.
I came back and taught in the design department a number of years later and in retrospect I saw that what we were really doing those first two years was simply teaching students how to approach problems in a designerly way. To care about craft. To sketch. To iterate. To _think_ like designers. It's hard to overstate how alien this is to most people and how long it takes to learn. Essentially you need to teach students how to be designers before you teach them how to be a particular kind of designer. But it's inhumane to drop an 18-year-old into a design curriculum. They need to ramp up and internalize the core design skills and work ethic. Even once they get into the actual design classes in the 2nd year it's really just baby steps; basic visual design fundamentals and basic design software skills. Then basic typography and information design etc... There's never enough time. Even for the design stuff. You can only realistically do about two studio design courses a semester, along with maybe a tangental studio course in photography or drawing. That's 18 hours of studio a week and another 18 hours outside of class working on projects. Plus lecture courses and general education. And teaching students to appreciate code while they're learning to be designers? Uhg. It's like pulling teeth to teach design students how HTML works, much less Actionscript or Processing. And once you take into account IA or human factors or research skills? I don't know if it's possible to do it within a four year college framework. I'd take Dan's list and besides adding much more history, a color theory course, a photography course, a motion course, a web design course and a design software course I'd add another year before everything, just for basics in drawing and experimenting with two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. Less rigorous than IDF. Give kids a chance to experiment and decide whether 36 hours a week of studio work is in their blood or not and weed out the dilatantes. What is that? Six years? The University of Cincinatti turns out skilled interface designers through their Bachelors of Science in Digital Design program. But they don't use the traditional college framework. It's a quarter system rather than semesters with a comprehensive internship program built into the curriculum. It's the closest thing I know to an undergraduate interface design degree. // jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=30515 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
