Carmen and I are working on the presentation for Interaction 12, and I’m getting pretty excited about the content we’re developing. I’ll be speaking for forty-five minutes in Dublin about a learning pattern we’ve observed during our 2.5 years designing and teaching a high school interaction design class.
In designing Project: Interaction, we started with research then developed a plan based on what we knew. We continuously altered that plan in response to the people and environment around us. We generated a path of learning as creators of an educational experience. At its most basic definition, that path can be described as
Setup -> (Action <-> Measure) -> Share
Taking action and measuring the result is a loop.
We’ve seen the same pattern of behavior when our students learn in class. If we describe the trajectory of our semester as a journey, it would be
Entry -> Exposure -> (Make -> Demonstrate -> Reflect) -> Show Off
The journey is a more detailed interpretation of our own basic process. This pattern also exists at the micro level, within each class or project itself.
We’re still putting the presentation together, and I’m really looking forward to hearing the community’s feedback on our ideas when we show it off in February. The model we’re proposing has great potential to influence the way we design human-to-human experiences, as mediated in a classroom by a teacher, or through the websites, apps and software we design.
More later, of course…