Leaving classrooms behind
Thomas Fogarasy, Founder, Designer at Exalt Interactive
The design industry is obsessed with data, usability, conversion time. Efficiency. But is efficiency the best indicator we want to teach to our design students? Is optimised production really the message? Interaction design, experience design goes way beyond that, this is why we should be careful about what and how we teach. Especially when it comes to tools. This is a short summary of my talk at Interaction 18 — Education Summit organized by the IxDA.
Students are often drawn to new, cool design tools, software. And if you take a look at our discussions in various online groups you’ll see epic debates of how Figma compares to Sketch, how Invision Studio looks way more cooler than anything else before. Tools that make our work more efficient and our lives less complicated. But a laptop is a box. And a laptop inside a classroom is a box within a box.
Moving war rooms
Some years ago, out of necessity, we had to start searching for places we could run our student design sprints. The University couldn’t provide a classroom for a whole sprint, so we’ve decided to pack our things and seek shelter at various design and product firms throughout the week.
Eventually it turned out to be one our best decisions ever. Occupying meeting rooms and workshop spaces around the city made the students realise, they’re not living in the Uni’s bubble anymore. Meeting developers, designers, managers on site and during the sprint helped them to understand the real, physical context of interaction design. This is just as important as learning processes or knowing efficient tools.
Kinesthetic learning
A designer should be someone with imagination. A being, not just an operational force behind a computer. Tactile learning requires students to do, make, or create. Students perform physical activities rather than listening to lectures all the time. Introducing tactile design tools and creating war rooms is a solid, first step.
While working with digital tools our body, senses, our soma is stripped away from our practice. We are passive actors using scientific tools, analysing and improving things from the background. As educators we have to cultivate a designer’s personality, senses, drives, ethically and aesthetically.
Another good format we’ve experimented with is the design camp. We’ve created a 3 day sprint schedule, moved our students, mentors and some of our alumni out of the city to a small, lakeside village and started to work on local problems. It is important to inspire students through real experiences. With that in mind we’ve decided to go completely off-grid, no digital devices were allowed in the design process. Service hacks, experience prototypes made out of paper, ropes, junk and cloths were then deployed on the last day to observe how people interact with them. Half of these prototypes used role-playing methods making the testing even more engaging (read more about the camp itself here):
How Might We Design a Camp?
The Attitude and Tools We Had in a Design Thinking Camp for Product Designersmedium.com
The format really made it work. Participants were more immersed, more motivated. They could interact with locals on the first day, establish an on-site collaborative war room on the second and test concepts with locals on the third. A whole, somatic experience.
Small things, hacks can make design education more engaging for students. Try to occupy some design offices for a few days, do gallery walks in agencies. Focus on soft skills, not tools. Current tools won’t be around forever. Go off-grid and offline sometimes to show what interaction design is really about. Focus on people and real, somatic experiences.
