Navigation

The foundational courses emphasize print design, learning code feels like learning a foreign language, designers grow frustrated when forced to spend their time in research and content creation, the holy trinity of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign offers only marginal help, new tools keep emerging and changing, and somehow, often with only a single course focused on the web or interaction, design programs across the country are expected to produce students primed and ready to enter an industry that assumes their readiness to construct and craft web sites, apps, and interactive experiences.

What do we do when faced with the goal of preparing students to work in a field that requires at least a basic understanding of code, information organization, interaction theory, content production, and basic page layout? Where do we begin? How do we craft a course or design a curriculum that provides students with the necessary foundation while also allowing creative space for experimentation and its accompanying trial and error?

This session will provide space for a discussion of the ways that educators teach web and interaction design as well as ways educators measure and encourage student learning. Examples of successes and failures, projects and outcomes, curriculum revisions and novel processes are welcome. Considerations of content, resources, strategies, technologies, and prompts will be explored.­ The panel will preserve time at the end for open discussion and strategizing with all attendees.