How to Make a Unicorn: Interdisciplinary Courses in Design Curriculum
Description
Through this presentation I will outline a sequence of courses and skillsets that have been successful in creating students with strong multidisciplinary skills. These courses start with a typical graphic and web design foundation, but after that they vary from traditional design curriculum. Over the past 10 years I've taught a variety of team-taught interdisciplinary courses with Design and Computer Science professors where students spend the semester building projects in groups, essentially, a semester-long hackathon. Students are encouraged to build projects far beyond the standard web or mobile app, and often build physical interactive installations that touch on unique forms of UX, physical computing, and deeply interactive spaces.
Other courses in this curriculum sequence expose students to virtual and augmented reality, electronics, projection mapping, and front-end web development. These classes are taken by design, art, and software development students. Often projects are developed in teams, but even if students are working independently, the projects organically feed off the skillsets of students in other disciplines.
Takeaway
The most critical takeaway from this session is an overview of what has worked and what hasn't. It's challenging to teach a team-taught course, especially between disciplines. Furthermore, it's difficult to build student teams across multiple majors. Throughout the years, I've discovered a formula for what makes students teams work and how to recover when projects go off the rails. Beyond the team-based courses, I've had success exposing design students to emerging technology using a project-based approach. The session takeaways includes not only best-practices and lessons learned, but a pathway to implementing these type of courses in your curriculum.
Abstract
As the intersection between design, creative coding, and experiential design becomes increasingly blurred, it is becoming clear that the future of our industry will prize interactive designers with a wide range of skillsets. Students with T-shaped skills who have a broad understanding of scope of what's possible in these emerging fields will be the most successful in the future.
As I've attempted to build a cohesive curriculum around creating these skillsets I've grappled with a lot of common questions: Do designers need to know how to code? Do developers need to understand UX? Can students be experts at everything? Does industry favor generalists or specialists? How important is team work in a multidisciplinary curriculum?
Through years of curriculum development and tweaking the amount of "tech" in our "design" classes, I've found answers to these questions. And I've found success teaching students to be a little of everything. It's clear that our industry is looking for these mashups of skillsets as new jobs like "UX Engineer" and "Creative Technologist" become the norm.