Last week, Carmen and I traveled to Hong Kong to present a talk at the International Conference on Interaction Design. We co-authored a paper titled, New Methods: Framing an Interaction Design Class to Complement Core Curriculum discussing our Project: Interaction experiences as they relate to students’ development in core classes.

Even though the trip was a significant investment in time (and money!) we were excited to present our work with Project: Interaction to an international audience. We met a lot of terrific designers working and teaching in Hong Kong and mainland China and saw a lot of great sessions from keynote speakers.

The conference theme was “Delight & Responsibility,” an appropriate concept during this moment in design. Many of the conversations and presentations were less about technology and more about the human experience that we design.

A few sessions that stood out:

Creative Coding

One of the best paper presentations I saw was from Tequila Chan of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Tequila’s background is in design. In fact, he’s never taken a coding class in his life, and yet he’s teaching advanced concepts in programming to college students. He articulated his framework for learning adapted from the 4MAT system introduced by Kolb and later refined by McCarthy. (An overview of the concepts here.)

In his talk, Tequila shared his belief that creatives have a unique understanding of the world and therefore cannot learn programming concepts in the same way a developer might learn them. He has tailored his PolyU class around a series of small learning cycles that address a range of thinking styles for those who naturally ask “Why?”, “What?”, “How?”, or “What if?” Each project gives students a chance to explore the material in each of these four methods. I can’t wait to get a hold of his presentation to adapt this thinking to my own class!

Designing Curriculum

I attended a workshop session focusing on curriculum design. I’m really interested in pedagogical methods for introducing interaction design at any level, and I found a healthy and spirited discussion in this seminar. I ended up sitting next to Dick Buchanan, who kept asking, “Should we even teach interaction design at an undergraduate level?!” In my tiny amount of experience teaching these concepts to undergrads, I’m inclined to agree with his line of questioning. I see my students taking away some of the larger concepts of interaction design, but one class inside a larger curriculum is nowhere near enough exposure to prepare them for any sort of interaction design position in the real world.

The debate included a series of great questions: How mature does a student need to be to understand systems design and business goals? How much can we expect busy college students to understand outside the world of college?

In the end, the discussion veered away from the design of curriculum in attempt to answer that fundamental question: Should we even be teaching this in the first place?

When I compare my high school students to my college students I see great differences in their willingness and ability to understand some of this material. What I find most interesting about the high school students is that we as teachers tend to translate the content differently. For example, right now we’re brainstorming ways to teach about site maps without making our students sit down at a computer to draw in Omnigraffle. Can we make the site physical in some way that represents the depth and relationships between content?

Maybe what we need at the college level is more hands-on instruction to communicate the web (and systems) in a tangible way that enables students to make the connection between content, structure and user experiences.

What does it mean to be an interaction designer in China?

One of the most interesting sessions was unfortunately conducted only in Mandarin. A friend sat in on the discussion and translated a bit of it back to us. She found it interesting that the Mandarin description of interaction design was quite different from how we describe our craft in English. Not only are the translated words different, but the concepts inherent in our work are different, too. We’re all here at a conference on interaction design – conducted in English – and it turns out we’re not even talking about the same thing. What I wouldn’t give to speak a tiny bit of Mandarin to be able to understand this cultural gap!