The Interaction Design Education Summit met for its fourth year, this time in collaboration with Interaction 16’s education partner Aalto University.
Each year, the Summit brought together design educators from academia, design & art schools, vocational programs, corporate/industry training, and lower-ed (K-12) as well as industry practitioners to talk about how all of us can better fulfil IxDA’s mission of advancing the practice of interaction design.
The program started on the evening of Sunday, 28 Feb, where Xiangyang Xin, the trailblazing Dean of the School of Design at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China, kicked us off and inspired our conversations for the following full day of speakers and working sessions. The next morning, Andy Budd of Clearleft got us going with a case study about Clearleft’s innovative interdisciplinary internship program. The talks are a mix of case studies, progress reports, ideas, and provocations. Working sessions were ½-day hands-on collaboration workshops centered on topics of concern. These were not tutorials, but sessions where participants were guided by a facilitator to help solve or frame a core issue for interaction design education. The always brilliant Kim Goodwin closed us out Monday evening by challenging us to think differently about the academy versus industry debate in design education. It’s was a fabulous program and we can’t wait for you to experience it!
