EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERACTION DESIGN: A CASE STUDY

This paper refers to a new educational experience in interaction design within the Design & Engineering Master Programme of Politecnico di Milano. The theme of interaction design is a novelty for the Design & Engineering Programme that is traditionally based on technical knowledge. In this paper, a new design studio conducted at the first year of the interaction design programme is discussed. The studio was designed to transmit to students knowledge and tools coming from research carried out by the authors in the field of interaction design. The goal was not only to teach students how to design interactive products, but especially to improve their skills in envisioning and designing meaningful and engaging experiences with products. Indeed, in previous studies, it was observed that students enrolled in Design & Engineering courses have the tendency to focus more on the product’s industrial feasibility, than on soft aspects like aesthetics and user experience [1]. During the design studio, three workshops were organized. This paper describes the three design activities and summarizes the students’ outputs for each workshop. Its purpose is to analyse the educational experience in order to evaluate the effectiveness of translating research insights into the design activities proposed to students.