Problems Teaching Design
From Design Education in iSchools
This is a page for entering in either idiosyncratic or recurring problems you face in teaching design.
Links related to teaching design:
- Problems Teaching Design - This is a page for bringing up problems people typically face teaching design to their students, and for us to have a discussion about strategies to address those problems.
- Persistent Conversation on Design Education - This is a page for more general conversations about design education.
- We will also be discussing things on the google group:
Please feel free to add your own sections on this page, and to create links from this page to new pages that you have created for longer stories or conversations.
Below is a preliminary set of sections for organizing problems in teaching design, but this categorization may be worthless, so feel free to redo it, or to come up with something better.
Contents |
General Concepts and Misconceptions
- "But I can't do design" - classic reactions from LIS and liberal arts background students
- "Design is just about making it look nice so people will buy it"
- "Design is about flashes of inspiration. If I don't get one soon then 'm no good at design so will drop the class"
- Trying to convince them that prototyping and iteration are a good idea, not an admission of failure to get it right first time
- Reluctance to explore a design space - clinging obsessively to the first idea
- Believing design ideas are rare and precious
Requirements Capture
Analysis
a clear guided analysis of the problems with a design leads to good suggestions for design fixes, but it is risky expecting students to do such an analysis unaided.
Prototyping
Paper Prototyping
- CS types think it is dumb and for babies and a distraction from real coding
- During an in-class pp exercise one CS student asked to prototype using a drawing package (a rapid lightweight one, not photoshop) because he (understandably though it would be much faster than pp, especially for copying and rearranging ideas. I said yes and he was amazed to find at the end he had produced fewer and less good ideas.
- Non CS types really like it. The fun and playful part removes inhibitions about doing 'Design'. But it is a real struggle to get them to user testing with their cardboard computer even though it is invariably revelatory,
- Some groups lapse into overanalysis, or obsess over trivialities.
Evaluation
- discovery based, formative, fishing expeditions v hypothesis testing
- some students struggle to see what a user study is telling them about design implications
