Two Days with Designers: IxDA Education Summit 2019
By: Alannah Oleson
Tags: Computing Education, Design Education, Ixda, Education, Interaction Design

A snowy Monday kicked off at the University of Washington’s Alder Hall with a brief welcome from Michael Smith, Director of UW’s MHCI+D program. Isabelle Sperano also let the group know about the IxDA Medium publication, which houses the resulting discourse from previous workshops. Keep an eye on this page for updates in March with the 2019 summit’s activity.

I opted to attend the presentation track for both the morning and afternoon sessions, where each speaker had 30 minutes to talk about a subject of their choice related to the guiding ideas of interaction design in flux or experimentation.

Beyond the IxD Degree Program: Why and How Industry and Academia Should Partner Around Pedagogy

Dianna Miller explaining the pitfalls in approaching design education from the lens of core competencies rather than the epistemology and pedagogy of design.

Dianna Miller of Syracuse University began the morning session with a response to a talk at the 2018 Education Summit on identifying core competencies for design. A better way to approach design education, she claimed, was to begin by analyzing how designers know what they know (their epistemology) and how they know they are teaching and assessing effectively (their pedagogy). To better prepare students for interaction design careers, Dianna called for teaming up around education: Industry should host educators as “faculty-in-residence” to gain better understanding of real-world design processes , and academics should invite practitioners from diverse fields to engage students in challenging conversations. She also encouraged educators to “radically share our teaching journeys,” not only in paywalled academic papers, but in publicly available mediums such as blog posts or repository websites.

Building Transdisciplinary Design Capability through an Integrated Studio Approach

Colin Gray describing the UX program’s six strands of learning, which are integrated throughout the curriculum.

Colin Gray of Purdue University gave an overview of the institution’s new undergraduate UX design major. The program squarely positions design as a transdisciplinary field, drawing from six different areas — psychology, anthropology, history, graphic design, philosophy, and ethics — to inform its curriculum. Colin argued that traditional design education, in which competencies are often taught in semester-long, siloed formats, aren’t as effective as threading the development of those competencies throughout students’ intellectual development.

“It’s like a rope…It’s the combination of all those strands together than make it work.”

In CS education, we’ve seen a similar approach being used for topics that don’t fit well into traditional computing curricula, such as HCI and ethics. A neat distinguishing feature of Purdue’s program is its support for students’ growth: Each student has a peer and faculty mentor throughout the duration of the program, and projects are conducted in teams of first, second, and third-year students rather than stratifying based on experience.

Silo-Busting and Island-Hopping: Blending Theory and Practice

Michael Gibson explaining the four “umbrellas” of theoretical approaches under which design students place their work: constructivist, normative, science and humanities, and systems-based.

Keeping to the theme of integration, Michael Gibson and Troy Abel of the University of North Texas presented a way to use theory to help students learn to avoid “solving the wrong problem in the right way.” At UNT, design students are taught theoretical frameworks for approaching problem-solving in their first term of instruction. As they design, students explicitly identify which of these frameworks they’re using to approach their research question, prompting them to explicitly consider not only their solution, but how and why they arrived at that solution. This allows students to start generalizing their approaches beyond one specific problem and gain intuition on which to base similar solutions.

In computing education, these kinds of metacognitive strategies have shown promise in helping novices programmers learn to problem-solve, so it’s great to see that similar approaches can help novice designers. Moving forward, CS education might consider integrating theoretical frameworks as guidance too, especially into introductory classes where novices tend to flounder.

4D Design at Cranbrook Academy

Carla Diana shows off Cranbrook’s radical approach to teaching design: no classes, no teachers, no grades, no crowds.

In the last talk of the morning session, Carla Diana walked us through Cranbook Academy’s radical approach to their graduate art and design curriculum. Cranbrook, labeled as “the most dangerous design school in the world,” takes a critical theory approach to teaching design and challenges its students to learn by interfacing with their wildest ideas. For example, Carla spoke of a student who asked What if plants could help nurture long-distance relationships? and eventually designed a “smart plant” that, when paired with a partner’s, would allow the user to see when the other person was watering or taking care of it. Central to Cranbrook’s approach is an emphasis on physical, functional hardware prototypes. Students learn techniques for creating not only with electronics and code, but with everything from traditional woodworking to 3D printing.