A guest post by, Jan Dittrich – the course co-ordinator of the ‘Designing for Action’ course in the Media Art and Design BFA program at Bauhaus University.
Phewww!
After a busy term of learning, experimenting and research the ‘Designing for Action‘ class at the Bauhaus University has recently wrapped up! 15 students dealt with Interaction Design fundamentals and applied their knowledge in solutions for ‘Collecting & (Re)finding webpages‘ – formulating final outputs & concepts – all in the open.
The Class – An Introduction to Interaction Design (IxD)
The class topic which chose to address ‘problems today’s bookmarking solutions face‘ – was co-created with Jens Geelhaar, Professor for Interface Design for the winter term of 2011.
Our aim was to introduce the students to User Centered Design (UCD) and User Research. The methods were new to the most of the students – so with our course we aimed for conveying the importance of user research and introducing suitable methods for students projects.
Prototype by Johannes Lerdon, Sven Sommerlatte and Carlo Enke
Together with the support of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series, the Student Outreach channel as well as some fantastic mentors – the course continued for a few months.
It initially kicked-off during early November 2010 and was followed up in early February 2011, by interim presentations, feedback & iterations.
A few surprise in-person visits to the campus also occurred during the second phase of the course.
Final Outputs – See Them For Yourself!
Be sure to check out the final team submissions as well as the feedback received from the mentors:
- Team 1: Carlo Johannes, Sven
- Team 2: Jan Schepanski
- Team 3: Sophie, Jule, Tristan, Laura, Alex
- Team 4: Vera, Mischa, Max
- Team 5: Bastian, Martin
Feedback & Mentoring
The teaching was accompanied by practical project work with some team achieving working prototypes.
Concept outputs were reviewed and mentored by three UX Professionals (Cennydd Bowles, Eric Reiss & James Kalbach)
Most feedback was conducted via the wiki and Skype. However on separate occasions both Eric Reiss (blog post including Web Dogma talk) & James Kalbach visited the Bauhaus which allowed for face-time with the students.
Student Quotes
Here are a few quotes from student learning while applying their new knowledge:
Mischa: Paper prototyping was interesting – and fun! It was amazing how easy it is to avoid errors via testing with simple methods.
Laura: What we did in user research fascinated me. In the beginning I though “Interviews are nice but […] people will have probably the same thoughts about it as I do”. But is was the other way! The interviews helped my a lot because the participants thought about bookmarking completely different than I did and used them in different way as well.
Going Forward
We plan on offering a repeat of the course, with a new topic during the course of next year. With tons of leanings to take away we plan of this one one being bigger and better!
Sketch by Bastian Buegler and Martin Breuer
What is Student Outreach?
It’s a Mozilla Labs Concept Series channel to give industry related experience exposure to students at global institutions – via co-created and collaborative Design (UX, UCD, HCI, IxD) courses.
We aim to directly work together to propose and structure a engaging course module that’s relevant to the institutions own goals, interests and timing schedules.
A number of globally located institutions are already collaborating with us on a number of interesting & challenging topics for 2011.
If you or your institution would like to get involved please contact Desigan Chinniah via email {dchinniah[at]mozilla[dot]com}