Thank you all for your input. I should probably add that this isn't something new for me - I've been working in the area for 15 years and teaching alongside that for about 9 of them. But I felt the need for a bit of fresh input and I thought it would be good to get people thinking about this now that more pure interaction design courses are springing up.
Most of the time interaction design is embedded, sometimes buried, within a broader digital design programme or media arts course (like most of mine have been), so some of that 'unlearning' has to go on. It also means the remit is broader - sometimes its very different to talk about how to develop an interactive artwork compared to an web interface, but there are more similarities than differences and both worlds can learn a lot from each other. I prefer talking about the user experience that context more %u2013 albeit with interactivity as a central aspect %u2013 because it allows some flexibility in thinking. I thought I would return the favour and let people know what has worked for me and what hasn't in the past: - Level of hands on help. When I first started teaching, I wanted to help my students do everything, although my own learning process as a student was much more self-directed (because at that time nobody knew how to use the tools much - Director 3 and Photoshop 1.5). What I noticed with my students was that the more I gave them help, the more helpless they became through a kind of learned helplessness. Now I point my students in the right direction and let them work it out because that way they learn. - Learning by teaching. Teaching other people how to do something is the best way to learn it. Getting the students to do that, even if it's just informally in collaborative work is a goldmine. - Debugging everything, including design. This relates to what Chris mentioned. The process of learning to problem shoot both code and design and how to go about fixing it isn't just for developers, but goes right the way up through the whole project. Problem solving the meat and veg of design. It's particularly important in interaction design because there are far less "standard" or "right" solutions. - Keep it small and simple. Smaller briefs, experimental studies of styles of interaction, etc. seem to be much more successful at getting students' heads around the principles and ideas than large projects, which never get finished anyway. They also allow small successes in an area which for some people is a steep learning curve (especially if they're learning some coding too). - Get off the computer. Lots of people mentioned this, and I'm really glad to see it. I try to talk about process and idea generation and iterative design without it being about the computer. In fact, it's best if it's not on the computer. The pencil is still the quickest idea generation tool. - Forcing prototyping. I used to tell my students that they really needed to have a prototype by about half way through the semester, if not earlier. Most of them ignored it and felt it was "doing the project twice" until the end when they realised the thing they had been working away was really dull and/or didn't work how they imagined. Now I build the prototyping into the course as a graded component - they lose marks for fancy graphics and finished artwork (!) - it really has to be a bare bones engine/skeleton. This way they get to the end of the semester and find that they've already done most of the hard work and the finishing up stage isn't the usual caffeine-fuelled nightmare. It also gives them the chance to change track halfway through the semester if things are working out with their idea. - Expose them to lots of stuff. This, I think, is the most important thing. To show students work that existed before the web, to show them where interaction design and the stuff they currently see fits on a longer continuum of history. It both makes sure that they're not reinventing the wheel as well as gets them beyond the "how do I know what to do if I don't know what I can do?" stage. Perhaps I can finish with one last question: What's the most valuable thing you learned in terms of interaction/user-experience design (either in education or through experience on the job)? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34437 ________________________________________________________________ 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
