Fostering Creativity & Effective Communication With Interaction Design Students

This paper presents our experiences introducing, developing, and teaching master and bachelor level design courses at a Danish computer science faculty with the central aims of fostering creativity and maturing the students’ abilities to engage in professional discussions about design and design choices. Reflections on our efforts in previous courses provide examples of didactic choices we have made to facilitate the meeting of these goals including iterative experimentation, experience prototyping, and a host of sketching techniques. In the second part of the paper, we reflect on a new seven-week master’s course focused on the design of shape changing interfaces in the form of a chronological journey description focused on the progress and challenges for teachers and students. Conclusions in the form of lessons learned and future refinements are provided, which may be of interest to others who develop and teach courses in creative topics.