Iterative Designing for IxD in IDE Education

In a world characterised by increasing connectivity and complexity, design plays a growing role in translating opportunities for innovation into meaningful interactions with products and services. At IDE we aim to equip design students with sensitivity to how products fit into people’s lives and society at large, and with skills to apply this sensitivity to designing solutions with technology. As technology plays a critical role in the majority of new products and services, it is urgent that we place Interaction Design (IxD) at the heart of our curriculum . IxD increasingly requires a highly iterative design process that puts prototyping at the core of its activities. Through iterations, design activities are carried out and validated from various angles, from vision and user experience to engineering. Each iteration delivers concrete manifestations of a design proposal that can be experienced by users, evaluated with team members and stakeholders from different disciplines, and can rapidly feed new insights back into the design process. We see undeniable value in this approach and we commit to stimulating, supporting and improving it across education in the IDE faculty.

Background

Over the last year the Human Information and Communication Design (HICD) section and the Design Conceptualisation and Communication (DCC) section have mapped all IxD courses in the IDE curriculum. Together, we have come to agree on the importance of strengthening the iterative IxD approaches at IDE. Courses such as Interactive Technology Design and Socially Tangible Media at the master’s level, and Cross Media Interaction Design, Interaction & Electronics and the Interactive Environments minor at the Bachelor level, serve as some examples where iterative designing and experiential prototyping approaches are successfully applied. However, the design and research methods developed and applied in these courses are shared in a limited way beyond the staff directly involved in those courses. We aim to promote understanding and support for these design and research approaches within the faculty. We welcome you to join the discussion and to work together towards a shared methodological foundation.

To focus our discussion we’ve put together a list of 10 rules we expect our students to work by in an iterative design process. They’re open for debate and examples will follow.