One of the Committees I’m on (the other being the Admissions Committee for the Masters in HCI Program) is the Curriculum Committee for the design track of the HCII. For more than a year, there has been a movement from the faculty to revamp some of the core classes that are taught to both better serve the students and simplify the courses we offer.
Just as a bit of background, the design classes in the HCII have a wide constituency. Students take our classes from all over CMU, and they can be undergrads, Master’s, or Ph.D. students. Some have zero design background. But that’s ok because, duh, we’re teaching design. And like Dick Buchanan once said, “Design is like California: no one is born there.” And if students from business or humanities or engineering or wherever want to learn design, god bless them. They’ll be better for it in life and in their careers.
As it stands now, students taking design classes from the HCII are often dropped into more advanced design classes without having ever taken an introductory design or HCI class. We do offer this course currently. It’s called Interaction Design Overview, but it’s not required for most of our classes. Many of the Master’s students, for example, have no design background when they come in, and most hope to start a career as a UX Designer or Researcher when they graduate. So how do we train them, get them to be industry ready—and teach them all the core life skills like critical thinking, public speaking, leadership, continuous learning, etc? This is the challenge.
These are things the Design Curriculum Committee thinks about. For several years now, i.e. long before I got here, they’ve been thinking about revamping some of the core classes. Namely, to take the Interaction Design Overview class and merge it with another similar class Interaction Design Studio 1. And at the same time, change the next class in the sequence Interaction Design Studio 2 into something more specialized. That might mean offering different flavors of it or breaking it up into different minis (half-semester courses). We’re still debating that and since that class currently won’t be offered until Spring 2024, we’ll probably decide all that over the summer, when a lot of courses actually get made. (The Fall and Spring semesters are usually too hectic to design courses, but it does happen.) IxD Studio 2 could be about any number of things: UI and design systems; design management and ops; cross-platform design… all TBD.
But right now, we’ve got to get the new class IxD for HCI ready. I have a vested interest in this because, well, I’m interested in it having built my career on it, and secondly because I’m teaching a section of it in the Fall.
A student can place out of this class if they are a design student or have a design background. There’s a committee to evaluate those applications and, unsurprisingly, I’m on that too.
The first thing you do when you create a course is to figure out what the learning objectives are. Here are the ones for the new class:
Apply appropriate interaction design methods in a human-centered design process.
Create persuasive interim and final design artifacts that demonstrate communication design fundamentals.
Facilitate productive and structured critique across the class and with instructors.
Explain and apply fundamental interaction design principles.
Create clarity and readability in artifacts, including GUIs and deliverables, through the disciplined application of visual design principles such as typography, color and composition.
Practice reframing a given problem in order to create opportunities that drive generating multiple solutions.
Demonstrate habits that foster the creative process, including drawing, divergent thinking, and creative experimentation.
Identify and explore with interaction design materials.
(Bolded words mine.)
It seems simple, but we debated a lot about these. What should someone know if this was the only design class they ever took? What should someone know if this was what they were using to start a career in design? How much could we put into one class and have it be a reasonable amount of learning and work?
The next thing to be done is to figure out what readings, lectures, exercises, and assignments will activate these learning objectives. We had a conversation with CMU’s Eberly Center, which helps faculty teach better and plan courses, and were told it’s actually harder to create introductory courses because as experts in the field, it’s harder to figure out how to best teach concepts that we’ve completely internalized. This is what needs to be figured out this Summer, along with the other new classes for next Spring.