Meet once a week for a three-hour session.

An assignment is given, and in the subsequent weeks, sketches and final projects are reviewed. The class critiques are designed to help the students learn from each other and resolve their design solutions. Class discussions are encouraged. The first half of the year consists of short projects designed to teach specific information design concepts, and the second half deals with one or two large-scale projects where students have the chance to wrestle with multiple problems.

Going from theory to practice

I want the students to understand why and how things work so their creativity can be guided by knowledge rather than having their designs be burdened by arbitrary rules. Because of this approach I have found that communicating academic topics, like labeling systems, wayfinding, and interface heuristics is much more successful if I present them during a class critique, rather than during a pre-scripted lecture. The students are more likely to pay attention because of the very clear relevance to the work they are doing, and a tangible problem helps them understand the abstract concepts.

In one of my first classes after assigning a project about organizing photos, I gave a lecture on classification systems. It was less successful than I had hoped because it was structured and pre-scripted to some extent, and I found that the lecture I had planned did not address a fair number of issues that I saw in my students’ work.

In short, design students (and designers) will more often produce wonderfully functional pieces of design if they understand the human interaction problems they are being asked to solve.

Realizing my errors, the next assignments I gave worked much better. I gave very clear problems that needed to be solved. I gave restrictions and requirements that focused the students’ attention on the problems that I wanted them to think about.

The follow-up assignment involved doing on-air graphics for an Olympic sport. I brought in screen shots and video clips of what NBC had done for the 2002 Winter Games. The students were asked to pick a sport and watch it on TV (the Olympics were on for another two weeks after I gave the assignment). During the broadcast they were to write down what information they wanted to know about the game, if the on air graphics (or the announcer) were supplying them with the information they needed, and how well that information was presented.

Armed with a user’s perspective and a clear objective, the solutions the students came up with were quite good. In addition, we did all of the class critiques with the designs displayed on a television, and the class began to understand how to edit their designs so they would read on low-resolution mediums.

Other projects that I assigned included: designing a kiosk for ordering commuter train tickets, making parking and trash collection street signs, and visual directions for making a food item. During class sessions I would ask students to use the designs made by their classmates. This form of user testing was easy and beneficial.

What about websites?

I have purposely avoided directly giving assignments that deal with websites. It is not because I think they are poor design problems. The issue is, websites have too many problems that need to be thought about and solved, a task that can be overwhelming. I also believe that many of the design issues that websites present can be taught using non-website projects.

Websites also bring with them the quagmire of technology.
A solution might be assigning traditional IA deliverables like wireframes and flowcharts.

I also have mixed feelings about having students do static Photoshop mock-ups of websites. This exercise places too much focus on the aesthetics, and doesn’t give them any experience in designing interaction. Photoshop mock-ups also don’t allow students to solve the design issues of designing for sites where most of the content resides in databases, and the content is created after the design is completed.