Educating the Next Generation of Interaction Designers

We are in an age where the power to connect in new ways feels limitless. This presents an exciting and important opportunity to shape the future to serve, empower, and delight people and society.

CCA’s Interaction Design program mission is to create a leading undergraduate educational experience to train future interaction designers with a bold and unique mix of skills that form the core of what is most useful and in demand in the field. The curriculum focuses on systemic and behavioral design with additional emphasis on the necessary visual and technology craft skills to communicate and demonstrate work.

These designers will learn to create meaningful and innovative experiences in the realms of work, lifestyle, and play—from computers and mobile devices to interactive physical spaces, games, and social networks. Students develop process skills (systemic thinking, design research, prototyping) and technical skills (wireframes, flows, visuals, motion, prototypes) for interactive experiences such as mobile, desktop, dashboard, game console, film, sculpture, clothes, buildings, and applications that can be applied to numerous contexts, from business to entertainment to education to health. Our program takes a studio-based, collaborative, playful approach to preparing students for both acquiring choice entry-level jobs upon graduation and to become future leaders in this creative and vibrant field.

In this talk I will discuss the program and how we developed it. Specifically we put a design process in place to learn from students what they are excited about and from industry, what they need most. Along the way I encountered a special handful of practitioners who both combined a phenomenal number of skills and were wildly successful. This process involved 100+ people and helped inform curriculum for what will make a successful interaction designer in the future.