Talk at Interaction 18 - Education Summit, Lyon. It covers the ways of how we teach design through moving our classes around the city and through kinesthetic methods at MOME, University of Art and Design. Interaction and UX design is something that builds on very tangible, human practices. We tend to forget this sometimes. Thoughtful education programs, practical experiments can lead us back to a better approach to design.

1. Leaving
Classrooms
Behind
@thomasfogarasy

2. Few years ago, on a Friday afternoon one of the managers of the
University I work with called me.
She said: we have a problem. Next week is course week (students work on
specific courses only), and we don’t have any classroom booked for you.
I said: I have 15 interaction design students ready for a 5 day design
sprint… and you’re telling me I don’t have any room for that?
She said: yes, I’m sorry but there are just so many important course week
programs going on, we just don’t have any room left for IxD.
So this is how it started…

3. I’m Thomas, founder of Exalt Interactive, a UX and service design firm.
This is our cozy office.

4. BUT, as many of you, I’m also an educator at a University. I teach interaction design for university students and I’m also leading a separate UX/UI
course for adults. For me, teaching design started out as a fun side-project 5 years ago, but it became an obsession.

5. … seems harsh, but it has some truth in it. And interaction design is indeed often about efficiency.
To produce more, to produce better.
“The worth of a person
is the wealth of the person…
The purpose of education in
a neoliberal age is to produce
producers.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/2/ — William Deresiewicz

6. TOOLS
In design education,
we’re focusing to much on

7. — Andy Budd @ IxD‘16
Design courses focus
too much on tools rather than
the design thinking or
problem solving processes.
But in design education we’re focusing too much on design tools and how to do production.
There’s something that resonates with this thought from IxD’16 in Helsinki

8. OKAY. Now how cool is this! The black UI with a supercool astronaut on it. It’s Invision Studio of course a real crafting tool.
No wonder students love to learn tools.

9. Preferred
Tools
(hard skill)
Soft
Skills
Typical practice
It’s tempting to satisfy these needs. It can alter the trajectory of how we teach. Yet students often melt down during a class presentation, when they
have to talk, defend their work. A more preferred way to do this is to seek balance of course.
Progress

10. A good first step is to introduce offline tools like “Scenes” we’ve used here.
A university classroom is a safe box. And the laptop is a box within the box. We need to get out of this.

11. Moving
War Rooms
So there I was, on a Friday, without any place to do our design sprint starting on Monday.
Well, we did the only thing we could. Pick up the phone, start making calls. Called our buddies all around the city. Designers of course.

12. We’ve found shelter in various places. This is us visiting IBM. Zoltan Kollin sharing some stories of how the design team works there.

13. …This is us dropping by at the creators of ARCHICAD at GRAPHISOFT HQ….

14. UI workshop with us occupying a room at LogMeIn.

15. Raiding Prezi HQ with some bonus gallery walk lead by Zsuzsa Kovacs, senior UX researcher

16. Right in the heart of Prezi’s HQ. We’ve moved in for a day, carrying all of our war room artefacts.

17. The fun part is, people start to gravitate to your workshops and war rooms.
Students are sharing some storyboards and paper prototypes with the IGO team by the end of a design sprint.

18. …A gallery walk at Emarsys…

19. …setting up our war room again at Emarsys…

20. This is one of my favourite photos… as you can see, we’re separated from the cross-functional teams only by this glass door.
Developers, UX designers are literally sitting right next to us, working. Again, very inspirational for the students.

21. Doing a gallery walk, settling in at GE ’s office.

22. We’ve moved our whole war room to one of their larger conference rooms. For us, professionals, it’s a common environment.
But it was something new for the students.

23. We did a 5 day design sprint more or less based on Jake Knapp’s book.

24. A snapshot from a participatory session. The guy in the middle is one of GE’s experts, helping one of the student teams with ideas.

25. So what’s the conversion? The University eventually granted us a great workshop space seeing our success.
But we do leave the safety of this place every now and then.

26. Kinesthetic
Learning
Another lesson we’ve learned is about the importance of kinesthetic learning. Learning that requires students to make, or create things. Students
perform physical activities rather than listen to lectures. It values movement and creativity over technological skills.

27. Photo: Balázs Horváth
Here’s an example of applying kinesthetic learning in practice:
This is Kenese, one of the most undeveloped towns at the picturesque lake Balaton and as such it has a lot of problems to solve.
It became the host of our first interaction design camp, where we’ve started to work on local problems.

28. A bootcamp is probably the best format for tactile learning.
To make this even more effective: WE DECIDED TO GO OFF-GRID. No laptops, no digital tools, no digital prototypes.

29. Our hotel was everything but luxurious. Like we’ve discovered a derelict restaurant right next to it.
The hotel was using the place for drying the laundry for some reason.
A pleasant surprise actually, as we’ve quickly started to convert it to our “center of operations.”

30. Grouping by temperament
On the first day we’ve quickly formed student teams. Now group dynamics can be challenging for different types of students.
What I did is I’ve formed groups based on temperament, not skills. You can do it on any workshop as well.
Just ask your students to form a line based on how loud, or how level-headed, they think they are
Loudest Most level-headed

31. Grouping by temperament
Group 1
Group 2
Ask every second student to step out. You’ll end up with a mixed temperament for each team.
You’ll have extroverts, introverts. And that’s what we did.

32. •
These mixed teams then went out and collected insights from locals.

33. Gathered cultural artefacts … you can see on the right.

34. …did storyboards, design principles, solution sketches…

35. at the end, the place looked more like this. We were literally and physically surrounded by our thoughts, ideas.

36. Our team’s war room on the last night before prototyping, with a service blueprint in the middle.. And yes, LOTS OF POST-ITS…

37. Karo Szmit ,2012
All of these are also tools of course. But such tangible tools create more engagement and even an aesthetic quality. Like this post it, from an
experimental art installation. It helps students to experience design in a tactile way.

38. TOOLS EFFICIENCY
In design education,
we’re focusing to much on
We’re also focusing to much on Efficiency. And by efficiency I mean conversion and usability.

39. Harmony
Efficiency,
data
Aesthetics /
Somaesthetics
Today’s UX culture
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-
encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/
somaesthetics
Our design community is obsessed with data, usability, conversion time, Efficiency. But our body, senses, our SOMA is stripped away from our
practice. Ww are passive actors using scientific tools, analysing and improving things from the background.
As educators we have to cultivate a designers personality, senses, drives. Ethically and Aesthetically.
The designer should be someone with imagination and also physical, sensible being.
Progress

40. The last day was about creating and deploying prototypes. This is one of them:
Finding gluten free food on the beachside was an issue discovered by a team. This is a role playing prototype where participants were invited to a
restaurant scenario and had to order food based on their given character cards.
For example, one of the participants drew the gluten sensitive card, so she had to scan the menu for what she could eat.

41. Others however got roles that needed them to act nervous, hungry, creating an interesting simulation of group dynamics.
We’ve tested 3 variations of a-la-carte menus involving different, role-playing teams and measured the ordering time and stress level of groups.
…Turns out, people actually don’t really mind if restaurants have more gluten-free and less gluten-rich food to choose from.

42. Another the team’s goal was to strengthen the identity of the town itself. We’ve used the Legend Making technique, and wrote a story of about a
famous local sailor who saved countless lives in a storm. This piece of junk we’ve found became a statue prototype for that.

43. We’ve revealed a memorial park with the statue through a role playing session simulating a major’s speech.
Again, being there, experiencing things with with our mind and body is what really counts. It makes us better designers.

44. We also built a news-board from junk and cardboard and placed it in the park. People walking by started to interact with it, placing messages, local
program recommendations on it. This is the whole setting.

45. This was a fun prototype… The title says, Lake Cinema - what would you love to see? There’s a sharpie attached to the poster so people could vote.
And they started to vote soon enough…. until some kids came around. One of the boys really wanted to see Deadpool.
So he added two stripes. His friends were standing around him and where super nervous. Then another boy added 4 stripes to the other movie. It
quickly escalated, and they eventually hacked, destroyed the voting. Wasn’t that hard of course.

46. There’s no moral in this story, but the interesting part happened beyond this scene, where the designers were watching the interactions and the
“drama” go down. It was an intense, somatic experience to witness all of this in real time with real, unaware “users”. Not something you can live
through behind a PC or even on a usability test.

47. The end was a ritual of burning all the things we’ve created. Post-its, prototypes, everything. Also a somatic, whole experience.
Some of the students were like really sad, almost crying to see creations diminish.

48. IxD Alumni in Berlin

49. Let me end this presentation by giving you some tips. Show your students what it’s like out there. Occupy some design offices, do gallery walks.
Focus on soft skills, not tools. Current tools won’t be around forever.
Focus on people and real, somatic experiences. Go off-grid and offline for teaching the most important parts of design.
Build communities and take care of your alumni.

50. @thomasfogarasy
fogarasy.com