In 2024 I gave a TEDxQUT talk titled Schools for the 21st century: A generation of brilliant designers.
The core argument is that our school systems are continually recreating the wheel in terms of trying to get design competencies into schools. I used the term 21st Century skills in the title (referring to creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking) because people understand it better than they understand design (which is a word that confuses people a lot).
Really do keep on trying to reinvent a design education within schools. Here’s an example of some of the buzzwords (with examples of how they get talked about) that have been popular over the years that are all talking about more a designerly education:
The problem is that designerly education keeps being reinvented in schooling but is never taken seriously enough to lead to systemic change.
My TEDx talk was motivated by the question: What would it look like if we took design seriously in education?
I’m happy to say that I am now writing a book with Leighann Ness Wilson on this topic, with the title Taking Design Seriously in Education. It will be released by Cambridge later in this year in their Elements series.
The TEDx talk
Watch it here, and there’s a transcript function in YouTube these days if you just want the text. In hindsight, I wish I’d made the talk better suited to the medium by using more wit and less earnestness, but it’s where I was at the time. It really is a good reflection of where I’ve gotten to after 20 years of researching design and education.
References
Hammer, D. (1997). Discovery Learning and Discovery Teaching, Cognition and Instruction, 15:4, 485-529, DOI: 10.1207/s1532690xci1504_2
Kelly, N., & Gero, J. S. (2021). Design thinking and computational thinking: A dual process model for addressing design problems. Design Science, 7, e8.
Wrigley, C., & Straker, K. (2017). Design thinking pedagogy: The educational design ladder. Innovations in education and teaching international, 54(4), 374-385.
Interaction design is an evolving field that shapes the way people engage with technology. From the smartphones we use daily to virtual reality experiences, interaction design focuses on how humans interact with complex digital and physical systems. But what holds this discipline together?
I recently published a journal article in the journal Design, Business & Society with my colleagues Sam Hobson and Jess Greentree (Kelly et al., 2024). Here’s my summary of the piece and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you’re interested in questions of:
What is interaction design?
Why are there so many diverse things that all get labelled interaction designer and how do they relate to each other?
What’s the relationship between interaction design, experience design, and UX design?
The work helps clarify the discipline and makes it more accessible for designers, educators, and researchers alike.
At its core, interaction design is about creating meaningful dialogues between people and technology (Kolko, 2010). Unlike traditional design fields that focus on static objects, interaction design is dynamic—it considers how users interact with and influence digital and physical environments over time. Whether designing a user-friendly website or an immersive gaming experience, interaction designers work to shape how we experience and control technology.
The Three Pillars of Interaction Design
In the paper, we propose three theoretical foundations for interaction design (Kelly et al., 2024).
Interaction design involves seeing the world as design for dialogues between users and complex artefacts.
Designing for such dialogues involves a high degree of design complexity.
This is because interaction design is concerned with dialogues that extend across both the material and the representational with a complex interface between the two. As a consequence, IXD is associated with design for the virtual.
Why These Foundations Matter
By defining these three theoretical foundations, we provide a framework that aims to add coherence to understandings of interaction design. Many designers, educators, and researchers work within this discipline, but their approaches can be vastly different. Some focus on artistic explorations of human-computer interaction, while others are concerned with practical applications like improving website usability. The three pillars offer a common language that can help bridge these different perspectives.
Moreover, this framework is particularly useful for educators who need to teach interaction design in a way that prepares students for future developments. As technology evolves, the specific tools and platforms designers work with will change, but these foundational principles will remain relevant.
Examples of Interaction Design in Action
To illustrate these principles, the paper considers three real-world applications of interaction design:
Theoretical Exploration: Kristina Höök’s book Designing with the Body (2018) explores how physical sensations influence interaction design.
Practical Application: The Threatened Australians website (Kelly et al., 2022) was designed to connect users with conservation efforts for endangered species.
Artistic Exploration: The interactive installation Water Mirror (Seevinck, 2022) uses reflections, weather data, and digital effects to create a dynamic experience that changes based on viewer interactions.
Please do have a read of the paper to better understand what we talk about when we talk about interaction design. It’s particularly meaningful for anyone who teachers interaction design. You can find the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1386/dbs_00058_1
References
Hook, K. (2018). Designing with the body: Somaesthetic interaction design. MIt Press.
Höök, K., & Löwgren, J. (2021). Characterizing interaction design by its ideals: A discipline in transition. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 7(1), 24-40.
Kelly, N., Hobson, S., & Greentree, J. (2024). Three theoretical foundations for interaction design theory, practice and exploration. Journal of Design, Business & Society, 10(1), 43-60.
Kolko, J. (2010). Thoughts on interaction design. Morgan Kaufmann.
Stolterman, E. (2008). The nature of design practice and implications for interaction design research. International Journal of Design, 2(1).
I truly love this paper which describes an approach to co-designing new Internet of Things devices and interactions (Berger et al., 2019). It brings together a few things that I think embody timeless approaches to designing:
They abstracted the essence of the design space into two dice, one for sensors and one for actuators.
They used a set of cards to help create different design scenarios.
The used prompts for the participants to say what kind of interaction they were trying to create.
All of this led to some great examples of novel designs, three of which are included in the paper. Inspiring stuff.
References
Berger, A., Odom, W., Storz, M., Bischof, A., Kurze, A., & Hornecker, E. (2019, May). The inflatable cat: Idiosyncratic ideation of smart objects for the home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).
The role of learning designer is poorly understood. In practice, learning designers within universities are often given jobs associated with learning technology (“can you please just put this up on the learning management system for me?”, etc.) In theory, though, learning designers are supposed to be concerned with the practice of designing for learning.
As Steven Kickbusch (2022) describes in his thesis on the topic of How learning designers work with teachers, learning designers need to be good at designing for learning (what activities need to be designed to make desired learning happen?), facilitating a co-design process (how can I work with a subject matter expert to ensure a good outcome from our design work together?), and also mentoring/coaching teachers (how can I ensure that the capabilities of my organisation to design for learning improve over time through my doing my job?).
I had the good fortune to work with Steven in developing a paper about ways to represent the process of designing for learning (Kickbusch & Kelly, 2021). Steven came up with the notion of Learning design process flow maps (LDPFMs) that capture the progression-over-time of the design for learning process.
The figure below (following Kickbusch & Kelly, 2021) shows an example of a LDPFM. I really like these figures as they show how a learning designer, teacher, or anyone else engaged in design for learning is proceeding with their process. The headings represent important aspects of a design for learning. LDPFMs are simple to create and obvious once you see one which is a good sign that they are helpful. They are very useful for understanding what’s going on in the design process when designing for learning.
Are the designers considering objectives before jumping into activities? The order in which things happen really matter and become visible through these figures.
I feel like there are many uses for these types of figures and I do hope that further research is conducted by Kickbusch and others to better understand the practice of learning design and the nature of expertise in design for learning.
References
Goodyear, P. (2023). An education in educational technology. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 39(3), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.9082
I’ve recently published a paper with my colleagues Claire Brophy, Lisa Scharoun, Melanie Finger, and Deanna Meth. The aim of the paper is to suggest that when universities are designing professional development for their staff (whether about policy, learning and teaching, research, compliance or anything else) there are three recognisable approaches:
Help-yourself portals, like a website or set of videos where you access the learning yourself.
Drive-by workshops, where you attend a one hour-ish talk from someone about what you need to know (from an implicit transmission of knowledge standpoint).
Co-design of knowledge with staff, where staff are actively involved in creating the knowledge and bring their own experiences into the learning.
Each has its place but co-design is often neglected.
The paper concludes with these guidelines for how to use co-design for professional develoment:
Guidance for professional learning through co-design
Professional learning in universities here is conceived of as existing in a broad range of circumstances, from new policies to new processes to new paradigms and across the scope of academic, professional, and executive staff. A case study in the context of (staff) learning about designing for transdisciplinary learning experiences (for students) has provided an example of co-design for professional learning in practice. This final section aims to share heuristics about the use of co-design within professional learning and can be considered as partial responses to the questions: Should I use co-design here? How do I use co-design? Is it really co-design? (Moll et al., 2020).
These heuristics are:
For co-design to be authentic it requires that the problems being addressed are of significance to those taking part in the co-design. In our example the academics involved had expressed interest in addressing the challenge of creating new transdisciplinary learning experiences for the institution-wide development.
Those facilitating co-design need to be experienced design facilitators to overcome common pitfalls, such as overcoming participant reticence to engage and the need for time management. The professionalism of design facilitation is poorly understood by those who lack these skills (Evans et al., 2021; Mosely et al., 2021).
There are circumstances where other approaches of help-yourself platforms or drive-by workshops are more appropriate. The benefit of using co-design over these approaches is that learning happens whilst simultaneously meeting the basic needs of staff: valuing their competency, permitting their autonomy, and creating connections through authentic, shared problem solving.
Co-design is only authentic (rather than performative) if the power to co-generate knowledge is shared within the space and has meaning to the organisation outside of that space.
Co-design takes time. Knowledge that could be disseminated through a drive-by workshop would (by our estimate, based on experience) take at least three times as long to share through an authentic co-design process.
Co-design is situational. There is no cookie-cutter template for how to run a co-design session. Extant kits for running design thinking workshops are no substitute for planning a co-design session to suit the specific learning circumstances. The idea of designing a co-design session through consideration of set design, social design, epistemic design, and design for co-configuration can be a useful way to approach a particular situation.
Professional identity and trust as significant factors in designing PD
This suggestion for co-design as PD fits well with recent analysis of the types of PD that staff at a regional university consider to be successful (Herbert et al., 2023). The authors found that PD was more likely to be successful when it considered the professional identity of the staff involved and when it involved placing trust in those staff.
This fits well with the case for an increase in the amount of co-design for professional learning in universities. I do wish that our university leaders would read this kind of research and use approaches that involve trust and recognition of staff expertise more frequently!
Obviously only when appropriate as it does take more time and resources but too often such approaches are not even on the radar.
References
Herbert, K., van der Laan, L. & Danaher, P. A. (2023) Towards an Australian regional university professional development typology: a qualitative exploration of the academic voice, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2023.2242816
Kelly, N., Brophy, C., Scharoun, L., Finger, M., & Meth, D. (2023). Co-design for staff professional learning within universities: a case study. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-12-2022-0381
Moll, S., Wyndham-West, M., Mulvale, G., Park, S., Buettgen, A., Phoenix, M., Fleisig, R. and Bruce, E. (2020), “Are you really doing ’codesign’? Critical reflections when working with vulnerable populations”, BMJ Open, British Medical Journal Publishing Group, Vol. 10 No. 11, e038339, doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-038339.
The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is planning to create a version of itself in the metaverse, as a response to the existential threat of rising sea levels. Tuvalu’s minister for justice, communication and foreign affairs, Simon Kofe, made the announcement via a chilling digital address to leaders at COP27.
He said the plan, which accounts for the “worst case scenario”, involves creating a digital twin of Tuvalu in the metaverse in order to replicate its beautiful islands and preserve its rich culture:
The tragedy of this outcome cannot be overstated […] Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in cyberspace – but if global warming continues unchecked, it won’t be the last.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/sJIlrAdky4Q?wmode=transparent&start=0 Tuvalu turns to metaverse as rising seas threaten existence, 16 Nov 2022.
The idea is that the metaverse might allow Tuvalu to “fully function as a sovereign state” as its people are forced to live somewhere else.
There are two stories here. One is of a small island nation in the Pacific facing an existential threat and looking to preserve its nationhood through technology.
The other is that by far the preferred future for Tuvalu would be to avoid the worst effects of climate change and preserve itself as a terrestrial nation. In which case, this may be its way of getting the world’s attention.
What is a metaverse nation?
The metaverse represents a burgeoning future in which augmented and virtual reality become part of everyday living. There are many visions of what the metaverse might look like, with the most well-known coming from Meta (previously Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
What most of these visions have in common is the idea that the metaverse is about interoperable and immersive 3D worlds. A persistent avatar moves from one virtual world to another, as easily as moving from one room to another in the physical world.
The aim is to obscure the human ability to distinguish between the real and the virtual, for better or for worse.
Kofe implies three aspects of Tuvalu’s nationhood could be recreated in the metaverse:
territory – the recreation of the natural beauty of Tuvalu, which could be interacted with in different ways
culture – the ability for Tuvaluan people to interact with one another in ways that preserve their shared language, norms and customs, wherever they may be
sovereignty – if there were to be a loss of terrestrial land over which the government of Tuvalu has sovereignty (a tragedy beyond imagining, but which they have begun to imagine) then could they have sovereignty over virtual land instead?
Could it be done?
In the case that Tuvalu’s proposal is, in fact, a literal one and not just symbolic of the dangers of climate change, what might it look like?
Technologically, it’s already easy enough to create beautiful, immersive and richly rendered recreations of Tuvalu’s territory. Moreover, thousands of different online communities and 3D worlds (such as Second Life) demonstrate it’s possible to have entirely virtual interactive spaces that can maintain their own culture.
The idea of combining these technological capabilities with features of governance for a “digital twin” of Tuvalu is feasible.
There have been prior experiments of governments taking location-based functions and creating virtual analogues of them. For example, Estonia’s e-residency is an online-only form of residency non-Estonians can obtain to access services such as company registration. Another example is countries setting up virtual embassies on the online platform Second Life.
Yet there are significant technological and social challenges in bringing together and digitising the elements that define an entire nation.
Tuvalu has only about 12,000 citizens, but having even this many people interact in real time in an immersive virtual world is a technical challenge. There are issues of bandwidth, computing power, and the fact that many users have an aversion to headsets or suffer nausea.
Nobody has yet demonstrated that nation-states can be successfully translated to the virtual world. Even if they could be, others argue the digital world makes nation-states redundant.
Tuvalu’s proposal to create its digital twin in the metaverse is a message in a bottle – a desperate response to a tragic situation. Yet there is a coded message here too, for others who might consider retreat to the virtual as a response to loss from climate change.
The metaverse is no refuge
The metaverse is built on the physical infrastructure of servers, data centres, network routers, devices and head-mounted displays. All of this tech has a hidden carbon footprint and requires physical maintenance and energy. Research published in Nature predicts the internet will consume about 20% of the world’s electricity by 2025.
The idea of the metaverse nation as a response to climate change is exactly the kind of thinking that got us here. The language that gets adopted around new technologies – such as “cloud computing”, “virtual reality” and “metaverse” – comes across as both clean and green.
Kofe is well aware the metaverse is not an answer to Tuvalu’s problems. He explicitly states we need to focus on reducing the impacts of climate change through initiatives such as a fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty.
His video about Tuvalu moving to the metaverse is hugely successful as a provocation. It got worldwide press – just like his moving plea during COP26 while standing knee-deep in rising water.
Yet Kofe suggests:
Without a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing we may find the rest of the world joining us online as their lands disappear.
It is dangerous to believe, even implicitly, that moving to the metaverse is a viable response to climate change. The metaverse can certainly assist in keeping heritage and culture alive as a virtual museum and digital community. But it seems unlikely to work as an ersatz nation-state.
And, either way, it certainly won’t work without all of the land, infrastructure and energy that keeps the internet functioning.
It would be far better for us to direct international attention towards Tuvalu’s other initiatives described in the same report:
The project’s first initiative promotes diplomacy based on Tuvaluan values of olaga fakafenua (communal living systems), kaitasi (shared responsibility) and fale-pili (being a good neighbour), in the hope that these values will motivate other nations to understand their shared responsibility to address climate change and sea level rise to achieve global wellbeing.
The message in a bottle being sent out by Tuvalu is not really about the possibilities of metaverse nations at all. The message is clear: to support communal living systems, to take shared responsibility and to be a good neighbour.
The first of these can’t translate into the virtual world. The second requires us to consume less, and the third requires us to care.
This is an article that I wrote with Gareth Kindler and James Watson for The Conversation, details below.Tim Carden (Digital Wando) was the developer and designer working with the project.
More than 1,800 Australian plants and animals are considered at-risk of extinction, and yet protecting threatened species is almost entirely absent from the current election campaign.
We’ve developed a web app, which launches today, that lets Australians learn which threatened plants and animals live in their federal electorate.
For example, we found the electorate with the most threatened species is Durack in Western Australia, held currently by the Liberal party’s Melissa Price. Some 61 threatened animals and 198 threatened plants live or used to live within its boundaries, such as the Numbat, Gouldian finch and the Western underground orchid.
Our goal is to help users engage with their elected representatives and put imperilled species on the political agenda this election and beyond. We urgently need to convince federal politicians to act, for they hold the keys to saving these species. So what can they do to help their plight?
The black-breasted buttonquail is an endangered and declining species found in southern Queensland. It used to be found in northern NSW. To be saved from extinction it needs members from around 29 electorates to work together and champion its recovery. Patrick Webster, Author provided
Threatened species in your neighbourhood
Our new app, called Threatened Australians, uses federal government data to introduce you to the threatened species living in your neighbourhood.
By entering a post code, users can learn what the species looks like, where they can be found (in relation to their electorate), and what’s threatening them. Importantly, users can learn about their incumbent elected representative, and the democratic actions that work towards making a difference.
For example, entering the postcode 2060 – the seat of North Sydney, held currently by the Liberal Party’s Trent Zimmerman – tells us there are 23 threatened animals and 14 threatened plants that live or used to live there.
This includes the koala which, among many others, have seen devastating losses in their populations in recent decades due to habitat destruction.
We’ve also put together data dividing the number of threatened species that live or used to live across each party’s electorates, as shown in the chart below. Labor-held seats are home to 775 of the 1,800-plus threatened species, while Liberal-held seats have 1,168.
A seriously neglected issue
The good news is we know how to avert the extinction crisis. Innumerable reports and peer-reviewed studies have detailed why the crisis is occurring, including a major independent review of Australia’s environment laws which outlined the necessary federal reforms for changing this trajectory.
The bad news is these comprehensive reforms, like almost all the previous calls to action on the threatened species crisis, have been largely ignored.
Predictions show the situation will drastically worsen for threatened species over the next two decades if nothing changes.
The golden shouldered parrot is only found in Queensland. Its entire population is found in the seat of Leichardt and its population has been declining dramatically over the past two decades. The long-term MP for Leichhardt is the Hon Warren Entsch. Patrick Webster, Author provided
So how can we address this mismatch of widespread public desire for environmental action yet political candidates are focused on other issues?
What can local MPs actually do about it?
For change to occur, communities must effectively persuade elected representatives to act. There are a few ways they can exercise their democratic powers to make a difference.
Federal MPs often champion and advocate important issues such as developing new hospitals, schools and car parks in their electorate. By speaking out and advocating for their electorate in parliament and with the media, they can garner the support, such as funding and reform, to deliver change for their electorate.
The numbat has disappeared across much of the continent in the last two hundred years. Now over 80% of its range now occurs in the electorate of O’Connor in Western Australia. The MP for O’Connor is Mr Rick Wilson. Shutterstock
Local MPs can help protect threatened species by instigating and voting for improved policy.
Let’s say, for instance, legislation for approving a new mine was before parliament, and the development overlapped with the habitat of a threatened animal. If protecting a certain plant or animal was on an MPs agenda thanks to the efforts of their community, it would help determine whether the MP votes for such legislation.
This has broader applications, too. Making the threatened species crisis a priority for an MP would determine the lengths they would go to for conservation in their electorate and Australia wide.
The app in action. Threatened Australia, Author provided
Our app can help users engage with the current sitting MP in their electorate with the click of a button, as it helps users write an email to them. It’s time federal representatives were asked about their policies on threatened species and what they plan to do for them in their electoral backyards.
While climate change has, for decades, unfathomably been the subject of fierce debate in the Australian parliament, threatened species can be a cause of unity across the political divide.
We need an honest and urgent dialogue between local communities and their representatives about how to deal with the challenge these species face and what each prospective candidate intends to do about it.
Authors: Nick Kelly, Jess Greentree, and Sam Hobson
Okay, so you want to have a career as a UX designer. You know that you need to develop the necessary skills and get to the point where you have a portfolio. Something that is confusing for many people entering this world is the question of “what do interaction design (IxD) degrees have to do with the UX profession?”.
A lot of universities around the world offer degrees in IxD—how useful are they for people wanting to get into the UX industry? In this article we take a look at the way that IxD degrees around the world are promoted by universities and show some patterns in what they offer. This is helpful for understanding what you’re likely to find within an IxD degree.
How does IxD relate to UX?
In short, the term UX is used more often in industry and IxD more often within universities in many countries, yet they refer to similar sets of skills. UX design includes the entirety of user experience yet definitions tend to be a bit confusing: they focus upon the extents of UX (what it covers) rather than upon its limits (what lies outside its scope). I’m sure you’ve seen some kind of Venn diagram about the area of influence of UX. These suggest that professional UX designers are required to be across an improbable number of areas: from marketing to computer science, architecture, human factors, and sound design.
IxD is more clearly defined in academic literature, but the term isn’t used widely in industry. IxD is ususaly defined as “shaping digital things for people’s use” (Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004) or “the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services” (Cooper et al., 2014). We like to define it as “designing for dialogues between people and complex things”, because the skills for interaction design are useful regardless of whether you’re working with digital.
Every country has its own culture around interaction design and UX design. In Australia, we’re in a situation where you can find hundreds of jobs that are looking for a UX designer and hardly any that say they are looking for an interaction designer. Yet nearly all of the degrees are badged as interaction design degrees or majors. This is a confusing situation for many—the IxD degrees are useful for UX but it’s hard to find anybody telling you how it works.
What’s in an interaction design degree?
We analysed a selection of interaction design degrees across USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, Table 1.
There are four patterns that stand out within these descriptions of interaction design degrees:
Many of the degrees explicitly mention the fact that they will help people to gain entry into the UX profession
Many will teach you how to design for emerging technologies and list off technologies you will work with, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI).
Many emphasise that you will learn general design skills, such as creativity, systems thinking, creating experiences for users
Many reference the fact that we don’t know the kinds of design that will be needed in future and that an IxD degree will help you be ready for it and shape it
Should I study an degree in interaction design?
In an interaction design degree, your studies won’t be as focused as they would be in a UX-specific qualification. There are plenty of non-university UX qualifications that can be found online that can provide a much cheaper and faster way to gain skills and develop a portfolio if you’re really clear that you’re just wanting to get a job and enter industry.
What a good interaction design degree will do is fulfil all four of these promises. You’ll be taught explicitly about the UX industry and how to thrive within in, through assistance with critical steps like developing a portfolio and learning the skills any employer would expect. You’ll be exposed to a range of technologies that you might otherwise not get the chance to try out—at the moment, for example, many universities are giving students the chance to experience designing for augmented reality. You’ll also gain a much broader understanding of how to design in a way that isn’t dependent on any particular tool or technology. These are the universal skills for interaction design: tools and methods for working with complexity, designing for dialogues between people and things, and how to develop a process that involves researching, prototyping, and testing. You’ll be introduced to ways to think critically about technology that will be useful in a changing world. There is no right answer as to whether an interaction design degree, a UX degree, or a non-degree qualification is right for you. The aim of this article is to resolve a common question of “what’s the relationship of the IxD degree to the UX profession?”
About the authors:
Nick Kelly, Jess Greentree, and Sam Hobson teach interaction design at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Nick is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design. Jess is currently studying a PhD in interaction design. Sam is currently studying an MPhil in Interaction Design while working as a designer in industry.
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Interaction with electronic devices is a major part of our daily lives. From early childhood onwards we are connected to the internet, telecommunications and networks of computer-based technologies. The emerging challenges in this radically evolving field are not so much with the nature of new technologies, but with their design. How should these technologies be experienced in our lives? How can they support and enhance our everyday practices? What should they help us become? These programs train students to address these issues through the design of new interactive technologies.
Studying on BA (Hons) Design Interactions, you will be at the forefront of future-focused design. You will experiment and develop emerging technology such as AR/VR (XR), AI, game engines, electronics, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), ‘Big Data’ and robotics. You will play a role in shaping the world around us with free thinking ideas and opportunities.
Bachelor of Design Innovation (Interaction Design)
The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable people to achieve their objectives in the best way possible. Often the products are apps or websites, but can also be games or physical interactive products. It’s one of the newest and fastest-growing fields of design and has a big overlap with User Experience (UX) design.
Studying Interaction Design, you’ll learn how to develop and use design strategies to bring together words, visual representations, physical objects or space, time, and people’s behaviour to create digital systems and interfaces that improve aspects of human life. Interaction designers envision how people experience products and bring that vision to life in ways that feel inspired, refined, delightful and even magical.
As a student on this programme, you’ll gain a broad understanding of the tools and concepts driving the discipline. You’ll cover topics that investigate the human condition, such as design psychology and design for experience (UX). You’ll explore the latest technology in areas such as web and game design, healthcare design, and design of interactive installations. Interaction design offers pathways to learn coding; from advanced to just enough to help you communicate your design to developers and other disciplines.
Interaction designers are social and empathetic, and they enjoy working in groups. They have an understanding of people’s backgrounds, interests, and cultures. If you have an interest in improving the quality, health, and efficiency of human endeavours, Interaction Design is a great study option for you
Every technology interaction you experience in a day—from using mobile apps to playing games to wearing smart accessories to engaging with other digital environments—has been designed to maximize user experience (UX). By pursuing a bachelor’s degree in interaction design at ArtCenter, you will gain strategies and skills for creating person-first interactive environments and prepare to enter a burgeoning field of highly sought-after professional digital designers.
Table 1: Analysis of interaction design degrees around the world
How should we define interaction design? There have been plenty of attempts to do this in the literature, most notably by Jon Kolko in his 2010 book Thoughts on Interaction Design. Defining IXD is difficult because it means different things to different people.
I have taught a subject, DXB110, Principles of Interaction Design for four years. With two of my fellow teachers–Sam Hobson and Jess Greentree–we have thought long and hard about this question of definition. A definition needs to work for describing the industry (“what interaction designers do”) as well as the academic domain (the study of designing for interactions). It needs to be relevant for the past and the future as well as for today. It’s a tricky problem.
We have come up with some criteria for what a definition of IXD should do, analyzed a number of definitions of interaction design, and proposed our own definition. All of that is described in a journal paper that is still under review. I look forward to sharing that once it’s published.
We’ve developed a very short version of that work to use in our teaching that is much more accessible. It addresses the question: how should we define IXD?
I recently published a review paper with Bernadette Mercieca and Paul Mercieca in BERA’s journal Review of Education. This paper looks at how 96 different studies by researchers all over the world have analysed teacher activity within social network sites. These are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many others. What it shows is that there are serious and systemic methodological concerns in how researchers are studying teachers within these platforms.
The essence of the findings are that any researchers looking at teachers within social network sites should:
Report on the specific qualities of the groups of teachers that they are studying, including its size, origins, privacy, thematic focus, regional focus, and platform
Consider re-using existing frameworks for analysis (such as the ACAD framework of Goodyear & Carvalho, 2014)
Consider re-using or building upon existing coding schemes or research instruments and publish such schemes and instruments with their work to permit them to be re-used in future (a description of instruments that might be re-used are included in the paper)
Consider the sampling methods adopted and ensure that sampling is described in detail with all limitations made salient, with particular attention being given to self-selection and to recruitment within the platforms being studied.
Consider the claims being made and ensure that they are specific with respect to the population that they apply to and the conditions under which they are likely to apply
Of all of these, number (4) is the biggest concern in my opinion. Many studies use self-selection during recruitment; where that self-selection is taking place within a group that is already self-selected by being on that platform. As in, say, teachers using a Twitter hashtag are only a small proportion of all teachers, and then to just sample the teachers who respond to your survey really doesn’t say much about the population of all teachers. Yet many papers seem not to take care with the claims (point (5) here).
The paper also includes a summary of all of the key themes that are addressed with respect to teachers in social network sites (or social media as people sometimes refer to it still). This is Figure 2 within the paper. It shows an abstract model of relationships between domains of change, observable teacher behaviours (within social network sites), and the outcomes that have been hypothesised as resulting from these behaviours. Arrows in this figure do not presume causality; they represent relationships that may come to be understood through future research
This provides a useful map for those studying teachers in social network sites to place their work within a broader framework.
Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2014). Framing the analysis of learning network architectures. In The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks (pp. 66-88). Routledge.
Kelly, N., Mercieca, B., & Mercieca, P. (2021). Studying teachers in social network sites: a review of methods. Review of Education, 9(3), https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3272
