Teaching at CIID 2014

Creating emotive digital services

The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) invited my colleague Jacek Barcikowski and myself to teach at 2 week workshop on UX for the CIID class of 2014. Being alumni ourselves, we naturally leapt at the chance to teach – and to be taught by – what we consider some of the smartest students in the world.

Collage of students working — Clockwise from top left: teaching in the morning, brand elements and colour schemes being explored, a tired student late in the night, live demo of a paper prototype.

Under the heading of ‘Emotive Digital Services’, Jacek and myself set out to guide the students through two rounds of end-to-end prototyping, loosely based on the design sprint methodology.

The first round, taught over 4 days, was a tightly packed schedule of directed teaching and hands-on exercises with a final experience prototype to be delivered after 4 intense days. During this period, we would teach students rudimentary persona work and exploratory interviews, basic brainstorming techniques, how to create and work with design principles, storyboarding and how to iterate and work with a number of prototyping tools – from paper to Keynote to video – along with basic best practice when it comes to information architecture, UI design, interaction patterns, working with motion and responsive design.

Radio reinvented: MixDown, created in 3 days, and later a finalist at the IxDA Awards 2014.

From day 5, we directed the students to repeat the process they had just gone through, but this time to manage their time and progress on their own. The only constraints were the brief ‘How might we enable people to learn a new skill’ and certain rituals; a morning stand-up where students would tell us what their plan for the day and an afternoon critique where we would discuss progress and guide the students. Through-out the next 7 days, the students would conduct their own research, uncover and validate their own concepts and finally product ‘proof of concepts’ to present on the final day. Throughout Jacek and I gave short lectures on the softer side of working to deadlines - like how to deal with pressure, dealing with conflict in their teams and making sure projects stay on track and on time.

We think the results speak for themselves - below are two of the students' ‘proof of concepts’. We hope you will agree that the results are pretty amazing, with students tackling everything from News to radio services, from apps, to car interfaces to big screen. Well done Class of 2014

How to... - Everyday you learn something new.

Flow - Learning on the go.