The Interaction Design Competency Framework (2016)
Adam Dunford
▪ It was during this time in the mid-1980s that Bill Moggridge--himself a multidisciplinary industrial designer and educator--is credited with coining the term “interaction design” to describe “the design of the subjective and qualitative aspects of everything that is both digital and interactive” in HCI (Moggridge 2007 p.660).
▪ Methods of prototyping range from sketches to paper prototypes to higher fidelity wireframes and design comps--all of which were used in this project to sketch out possible ways of presenting the framework and for mocking up how the survey website and corresponding visualizations would appear
▪ Voices within both industry and academia contend that interaction design education falls short in preparing students for their contribution in the workforce.
▪ themselves more of a loose collection of like-minded thinkers than a part of a wholly separate and new discipline of their own (Churchill, Bowser, and Preece 2013). This independent sentiment remained in the decades following, with one researcher concluding that, “there is no commonly agreed definition of interaction design” and instead is more of a “general orientation” towards digital products and an emphasis on how users experience them (Löwgren 2002 p.186).
▪ agree that interaction design education is inadequate, although they don’t always agree why. Most commonly, they contend that education is not keeping up with the rapid changes in interaction patterns and technologies that emerge, a conclusion that has been repeated for many years (Culén, Mainsah & Finken 2014; Faiola and Matei 2010; Foley et al. 2005; Grudin 2008; Myers 1998).
▪ overall methods or theories of performance, rather than use them to improve practitioner education (Mao, et al. 2005).
▪ Before one can learn what industry needs from interaction design education, one must first appreciate the context in which interaction design is currently understood, as well as the history for how it got to that place.
▪ Card Sorting
As an alternative or compliment to affinity diagramming, card sorting involves taking a set of cards, upon each of which is written a term, label or phrase describing a system, and then having users organize them into groupings that make sense to them
▪ follows a multistep process in which a designer determines first what to present and then how to present it in a way that reveals the intent of the design.
▪ The fourth element to note is that a good visualization allows users to explore the dataset to find additional information they might be interested in.
▪ “One way or another HCI education is not working, is not teaching the lessons that are required to the people who need them.” --Edwards, Wright & Petrie 2006
▪ even group of programs could be considered representative of industry needs
▪ Because of how much emphasis the interviews put on portfolios, it was interesting to note that 14 of the job listings (58%) specifically requested a portfolio, while only 7 (29%) mentioned a CV or résumé.
▪ Additionally, the job listings covered the breadth of what a designer would need to be able to do in the given position but gave very little indication of which skills or abilities were most important
▪ To understand what industry needs and expects from interaction design education, one should first acknowledge the existing concepts and frameworks that clarify and contextualize how skills and knowledge are perceived within interaction design and education.
▪ “Professional education is directed toward helping students acquire special competencies for diagnosing specific needs and for determining, recommending, and taking appropriate action. Professional education is also expected to socialize students in the 'thought processes' of the profession and to inculcate them with its customs, ethics, working relationships, and the behaviors expected from members of the profession.” (Hoberman and Mailick 1994 pp.3-4)
▪ Contrast that with the definition given for interaction design in one of the more prominent textbooks in the field:
“interaction design [is] the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Like most design disciplines, interaction design is concerned with form. However, first and foremost, interaction design focuses on something that traditional design disciplines do not often explore: the design of behavior.” (Cooper, et al. 2014 p.xix)
▪ Ignoring any evaluation of the quality of instruction or the ability of the students themselves--despite even an educator’s belief that they are providing valid skills that train a student for employment--the reality is that education is not enough to ensure that a practitioner can perform the tasks required for a given job or position. Instead, professional credentialing is the method used by various trades or professions to indicate that those who have been tested and evaluated according to specific requirements have the expected skills and knowledge for appropriate and safe practice of his or her profession (Balthazard 2010).
▪ While one could argue the definitions for skill and ability overlap, the KSA provides a good initial understanding that a worker’s competency consists of more than just performance of set tasks, but also encompasses the knowledge required to do so.
▪ The following methods exemplify the kinds of techniques a designer may use to gather information, organize and interpret results, generate possible directions to pursue, and subsequently drive the creation and evaluation of a design solution
▪ The Human-Centered Design process (Jokela 2010) Goal-Directed Design (GDD), although fundamentally a user-centered design approach, is a bit different than HCD in that it focuses instead on the what the user is trying to accomplish, the goal of the activity
▪ While each of the guiding factors could benefit from further research, the dual findings that the portfolio has the most influence on who to interview, yet is a poor predictor of employee quality, deserves more attention
▪ While the domains of competency organize capabilities into disciplines, the facets of competency organize capabilities by elements of performance. The five facets are
▪ This is supported by outside research in which 63% of managers in creative fields in North America said a portfolio was the most influential element when hiring an employee (The Creative Group 2011).
▪ Difficult-to-answer questions like, “What is interaction design?” are also known as wicked problems, and as such should be described further. Per Rittel and Webber (1973), a wicked problem refers to a scenario or situation that is ill-defined or complicated, includes too many criteria, and involves solutions that aren’t necessarily “right” or “wrong.” Instead, solutions to wicked problems are usually incomplete attempts that either cause unanticipated side effects or instead fail, and in so doing expose some element of the original problem that was unknown or misunderstood.
▪ While the level of detail may vary depending on what is intended to be conveyed, a sketch is about capturing an idea, not producing an accurate representation of the final design or product.
▪ As can be concluded in these job competency models and from other research performed during this thesis project, no current framework appears to have been created that describes job needs, worker skills, and business requirements in the context of interaction design.
▪ Instead, they merely reinforced the findings from the literature, that interaction design is a very broad collection of activities and encompass many related disciplines, giving degree programs broad latitude to develop independent programs that produce potentially very different interaction design graduates and practitioners.
▪ And yet, while interaction design embraces more and more disciplines, there are some within the research community who argue that possibly interaction design shouldn’t be considered a discipline at all. Instead, based on a lack of core research areas in the field, interaction design might be better treated as an “inter-discipline” that connects other disciplinary areas (Reeves 2015) or “might be regarded not even as a scientific field, but as a professional association, oriented toward practitioners as much as researchers” (Blackwell 2015 p.504).
▪ Applying Interactivity
▪ What is the role of interaction design education? Is it to address industry needs or is it to push boundaries within research? Is it to provide vocational training on the tools used in the field to produce skilled craftsmen, or is it to introduce design methods to create good thinkers?
▪ Rapid Prototyping
▪ However, a few research efforts to directly engage with interaction design practitioners have been conducted and should be mentioned, as they helped to guide interview questions and places where the gap between industry and academia may be.
▪ The most commonly requested competency appeared in 22 of the listings (92%) and was less a skill and more a personality attribute (“Collaborative”). Five other competencies were found in 75% or more of the job descriptions: “Prototypes” (88%), “Visual Design” (79%), “Interaction Design” (75%), “User Research” (75%), and “UX Design” (75%).
▪ Programming I
▪ Collaborative 22 92% Attributes
▪ Although the purpose of this thesis is to understand the competencies specific for interaction design, one finding was that the actual term “interaction designer” doesn’t have the same meaning to all people. In fact, because so many interpret what it means to be interaction designer so differently (as evidenced by the different datasets), it can be helpful to understand what skills and knowledge people attribute to other designer types and use as a point of comparison to determine whether there are unique qualities for one type of designer versus another, such as a web designer versus a UX designer.
▪ Interaction design has no such standard pedagogical reference model or accrediting organization (Thomassen and Ozcan 2010). And because each school and department decides just what to include in an IxD curriculum, it appears difficult for a prospective student to evaluate degree programs7 (and having unique names for an IxD degree8 likely only further confuses the situation).
▪ While some of this may indeed be due to inadequate education, industry practitioners themselves disagree with one another on what interaction design education should include, making it difficult for education to answer those needs.
▪ Working with Data (Data Visualization)
▪ Fry (2004) breaks down this process into seven steps--acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine and interact--yet points out that this is not necessarily a linear process.
▪ After I co-presented at the SIDeR 2015 conference in Kolding, Denmark, a professor from another school objected to what we had shared. Saying that our presentation was “too slick” and “pro-technology”, she objected that we hadn’t devoted enough time to our methods and had glossed over underlying concerns about our approach.
▪ Prototypes 21 88% Artifacts
▪ This relates to the third challenge within interaction design education: obsolescence. Even if academia and industry could miraculously agree on a curriculum, because of the rapidly changing nature in the technology and skills of interaction design as experienced in industry, this curriculum would become rapidly outdated and would need constant adjustments to stay relevant.
▪ Again, a previously referenced quotation from a university professor deserves repeating: “Not everyone will come out as a professional designer, they just don't have the skills. I don’t want them to drop out school, but I need to help them see that this field might not be for them” (M Lahey 2016, personal communication, 3 March).
▪ The focus of this thesis was to understand what industry needs and expects from interaction design education. The underlying motivation for this desire was to provide some sort of standard or optimal curriculum that could produce qualified interaction designers into the field of practice
▪ · Knowledge what you must know to perform a task the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject
▪ Selling & Presenting Design (Business, Entrepreneurship & Self Promotion)
▪ The following chapter describes that process and explains the methods used to uncover why there is a gap between industry and academia, what industry expects from interaction design, and how a framework can be created when one hasn’t existed before.
▪ Similarly supporting another conclusion of the interviews, 9 of the job listings did not mention any need for a degree17 and an additional 4 requested a degree but also allowed for “equivalent experience” as a substitute. And even those that asked for an interaction design degree also accepted other degree types, such as graphic/visual design or even engineering (see Table 18).
▪ Dozens of schools teach interaction design in undergraduate and graduate courses and degree programs. Hundreds of students graduate each year to take the thousands of jobs available in this relatively young field. However, voices within both industry (Rutledge 2010) and academia (Faiola 2007) contend that IxD education is inadequately preparing students for their contribution in the workforce.
▪ Prototyping
To further understand and explore possibilities without investing large amounts of effort, prototyping embodies the conceptual model of a designer as he or she attempts to explain “future conditions of use” of a proposed design:
▪ The best portfolios are more than just a collection of images however; per interviews and literature, diverse portfolios demonstrate an understanding of design principles and process and convey to the reader that the candidate can solve complex problems (Churchill, Bowser, and Preece 2013; Kolko 2011b).
▪ For the deeper analysis and comparison of specific jobs, the decision was made to perform the detailed job listing analysis using only jobs from a job board with “interaction design” as a given category. Because these categorizations are assigned by the companies that post jobs to the board, this ensures that those companies intend to consider their listing as compatible with interaction design, regardless of job title
▪ Instead of having one single result set as in affinity diagrams, card sorting takes the separate results of several users to see preferred groupings and use those as a pattern for the terms overall.
▪ As a way to quickly understand the problem space, a literature review involves exploring how others have studied a research area. This not only quickly builds a designer’s knowledge, it also helps to map out what has been done--so as not to duplicate effort--and identify where gaps exist, and thus offer areas to explore further (Knopf 2006).
▪ For example, looking at the top skills a designer should have within the Design domain, 63% of the jobs required mobile design skills and 50% required information architecture skills. Compared to interaction design curricula, those two skills were taught in only 42% and 13% of the school programs, which hints to a place of improvement.
▪ · Skills how you perform a task the specific practices of applying knowledge to produce design artifacts
▪ The first and most fundamental concept is defining what “interaction design” means, before one can determine what knowledge areas or skillsets should be covered in an associated academic program. This is only further complicated by interaction design’s interrelationship to other academic disciplines, design practices, and interdisciplinary fields (Figure 2).
▪ necessarily a linear process. Often the results of a later stage may uncover a shortcoming of an earlier stage that then needs to be revisited to produce a worthwhile result
▪ Not one of these courses was referenced even 50 percent of the time across all programs, not even presumably universal offerings such as “Introduction to Interaction Design”, “Methods & Methodologies”, or “Aesthetics” (see Table 14).
▪ And frankly, the results of this thesis project suggest that it’s not really about IxD education either, just what is expected from designers in general
▪ Cybernetics
▪ “Under practical norms, what unifies a single disciplinary perspective is the belief in common notions of mind-set, knowledge set, skill set, and tool set, where mind-set is what you think is important to you and to your discipline, knowledge set is what you think everyone in your discipline ought to know, skill set is what you think everyone in your discipline needs to know how to do, and tool set is what you think everyone in your discipline should use to practice the discipline” (Blevis and Stolterman 2009 p.48).
▪ Data Visualization
▪ In Divergence, the goals are unclear and the problem areas are vague, and so the design work revolves around describing the problems and finding possibilities
▪ Interestingly, despite the working group’s intent on having HCI develop as an area of study in multiple disciplines, they explicitly recommended against the creation of a specific HCI degree
▪ Design Management
▪ Additionally, they point to the instructors’ own interests and biases preventing students from learning industryrelevant knowledge (Winograd 1990) and the difficulties in presenting information in pedagogically effective ways that are also reflective of real-world working conditions (Lian-nan, Yu-long & Jia-xun 2015; Silva, Crosby & Polo 2014; Thomassen and Ozcan 2010).
▪ Emerging Technologies for Physical Spaces
▪ As can be seen in, nearly as many capabilities (15) were grouped into skill set as were grouped into the other three categories combined (20). Additionally, the kinds of skills that the interviewees emphasized most were not necessarily those most commonly mentioned when thinking of interaction design, such as prototyping or brainstorming; instead, they focused on the interpersonal and communicative elements of design in making sense of and conveying to others the designs that are produced.
▪ As someone who had interviewed and hired newly graduated designers in the past and often found them lacking basic skills or abilities, I was inclined to believe that education was the problem, that if only their schools had been more focused on industry-oriented competencies and more attentive to the latest trends and tools, those applicants would have been more qualified for the positions they were interviewing for.
▪ School offering the degree: While all degrees were most likely to be offered in liberal arts schools around the world, technology schools in Europe and Asia had a much higher proportion than in other places
▪ Attitudes how you feel as you perform a task the affective sentiments and mindsets the individual possesses about the task, themselves, or the people and environment around them
▪ School Departments that Manage IxD Degrees, ordered by frequency Design 70 Architecture 9 Art 30 Mathematics 8 Computer Science 30 Industrial Design 6 Information Science 26 Business 2 Technology 24 Professional Studies 2 Communication 22 dedicated IxD department 3 Engineering 18 multidisciplinary 6 Media 12 no department listed 3 Psychology 12
▪ Although the underlying hope of this thesis was to synthesize a standard curriculum for interaction design education that could match what industry expects, the results of research and data analysis suggest that such an outcome is unrealistic
▪ Future Wearables
▪ Without a clear disciplinary focus, there are few objections to suggestions that interaction design should include additional practice areas, such as business, economics and humanities (Culén 2015; Faiola 2007; Norman and Klemmer 2014), and for practitioners themselves to become more multi-disciplinary or transdisciplinary (Adamczyk and Twidale 2007; Blevis and Stolterman 2009; Churchill, Bowser & Preece 2013)
▪ As Rosenfeld and Morville (2002) explain, card sorting can either be open--meaning users provide their own labels--or closed--meaning the labels are predefined and the users focus on the organization
▪ Innovation in Service Design
▪ However, it became apparent quickly that not only was there no single solution, but that even trying to comprehend clearly the complexity of the overall design space was an almost insurmountable task.
▪ “Quite simply, these techniques re-create the various parts of this situation that do not yet exist. To make interactive cognition work well, the designer has to create her own working materials; before the world can become a part of cognition, the designer has to create it.” (Gedenryd 1998 p.157)
▪ If the goal of this work is to help interaction designers know what to learn to be attractive to industry, then I answered this from the first interviews: add a bunch of keywords and create a good portfolio. However, if the goal is about helping improve interaction design as a whole, then a larger thrust should be to help industry distinguish the skills that cause a candidate to be interviewed and hired versus the competencies they ultimately want in their prospective employee. The depth of that disconnect would require a much deeper dive into the work of which this thesis only scratches the surface.
▪ For example, in the represent step when a designer decides how to display data in a chart or graph, she may realize the dataset is too limited to convey anything worthwhile. So she returns to the filter step, selects different data to interpret, and continues through the process (Figure 13). This back-and-forth is the core of creating visualizations.
▪ The thesis project commenced in first exploring the problem space, understanding and describing the problems that emerged. The main areas of interest were in understanding how industry thinks of interaction design, how academia thinks of it, and how industry and academia think of each other
▪ In a subsequent one-on-one conversation, she broadened her complaint to me by saying that “all you Scandinavian schools are too focused on products and not enough on process.”
▪ Interfaces for Disabled People
▪ Interviews with Industry & Academia gave great insight into the hiring process and the limitations in general of determining someone’s skill levels, with the most insightful points being the general unimportance of a degree and the high importance of a portfolio.
▪ Perhaps one reason there is no such framework is how others have approached the industry-academia gap in the past. Using the scientific methods of user research and analysis, they’ve broken down the component parts of the problem in an attempt to understand the broader picture. Yet they haven’t taken the subsequent step to reassemble those parts into a cohesive whole. For designers, however, another path exists: research through design.
▪ In Transformation, the effort shifts to uncovering patterns in those findings and then choosing goals to define the solution space
▪ Based upon the research efforts of this thesis, several insights have been gathered that are critical to understanding what industry needs and expects from interaction design education. These factors, covered in detail below, can be summarized as follows:
▪ “There is no commonly agreed definition of interaction design; most people in the field, however, would probably subscribe to a general orientation towards shaping software, websites, video games and other digital artifacts, with particular attention to the qualities of the experiences they provide to users.” (Löwgren 2002 p.186)
▪ This leads to today. The opportunities for receiving instruction and training in interaction design aren’t just limited to accredited education institutions and degree program, if they ever were. Online learning courses, certificate programs, MOOCs, and training conferences proliferate alongside industry-oriented groups, such as the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and meet-ups, blogs, and Facebook groups that further connect practitioners with practice.
▪ Motion Graphics
▪ To remain current, MacDonald suggests the creation of a “living curriculum” that is dynamic and modular, yet structured and moderated, as it would give educators the flexibility to respond to what they see as changes in the world around them (2014). Yet this would still result in cases where one school has chosen to modularize in one way and another school in another and they are right back where they started in the first place: with inconsistent interpretations for what interaction design education should include.
▪ “The idea of an undergraduate degree focused exclusively on HCI therefore seems premature. At best it would be in continuing flux unbecoming a professional body. At worst it would provide a narrow training which left graduates without a base for future growth.” (Hewett et al. 1992 p.56)
▪ Physical Computing
▪ When asked about the importance of a design degree, interviewers that had hired designers said it was completely unimportant in their decision, mainly because it was nearly impossible to know what skills the person had, whereas a portfolio could demonstrate skill or ability quickly
▪ Seminars & Workshops
▪ Tools what you use to perform a task the external assets utilized to complete a task, be it a physical object (such as pen and paper), digital artifact (such as software), or design artifact being worked on
▪ Smart Objects
▪ The most common assertion is that education is not keeping up with the rapid changes in interaction patterns and technologies that emerge, a conclusion that has been repeated for many years (Culén, Mainsah & Finken 2014; Faiola and Matei 2010; Foley et al. 2005; Grudin 2008; Myers 1998). At face value this makes sense; after all, the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction hasn’t been officially updated in the 24 years since it was first published (Hewett et al. 1992).
▪ Storytelling, Narrative and Interactivity User Experience Design
▪ Interaction design education emerged as different disciplines independently determined certain skillsets they deemed necessary. As time progressed, educators and researchers came together to find commonalities among their various practices to describe a core set of learning areas for students. However, interaction design education at most schools has remained under the influence of the various “parent” disciplines from which it developed.
▪ In Convergence, the focus moves to reaching those goals, as possibilities are selected and then implemented in one final solution
▪ When researchers can’t agree on a definition for interaction design, then describing an associated education is difficult to define as well.
▪ The passion behind her questioning surprised me. I thought it was a good thing that we focused on our results in the presentation rather than dwell on the minutia of methods as found in our accompanying paper (Dunford and Castillo Antolin 2015). Other students I spoke with agreed.
▪ The first step was reconsidering those domain categories from the DEM--Social, Design, Business, and Computing--not as purely areas of knowledge or learning but rather areas of work within interaction design
▪ From the expert interviews, practitioners echoed some of the above critiques while also describing graduates that lacked experience with industry-standard tools such as Photoshop, or knowledge of aesthetics or coding, and were therefore unable to contribute immediately. The educators interviewed agreed with most of these points, although pushed back on the idea that graduates should be immediately productive, citing fields such as architecture and law in which newly hired employees are trained on the job by more senior personnel.
▪ Nevertheless, one place to begin, particularly in the context of interaction design education, is with the definition given for human-computer interaction by the original ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Development Group:
▪ A prototype then is used as an intermediate step to unify the differing and complicating thoughts of a researcher through iterations of design, be they new ideas, ways to convey an existing idea to others, or to explore possible approaches quickly (Benyon, Turner & Turner 2005) (see also Figure 12).
▪ The expectation was not to find definitive answers, but to describe problems and find possible areas of investigation.
▪ Comparing these administering departments against the degrees they administer (Table 9), one can see that although most degree titles were managed under a Design department, it was noteworthy that Computer Science disproportionally oversaw programs in HCI and Human-Centered Design, while Psychology oversaw Human Factors, reflecting the historical origins of those programs.
▪ Interaction design lacks a unifying disciplinary core
▪ Qualifications what indicates you can perform a task the formal and informal credentials that indicate one’s ability, such as a degree, portfolio, certificate, or previous experience
▪ At the same time, I empathized with the educators at these schools too, for I had also spent some time as an adjunct instructor of web design at a small vocational college, and felt that the curriculum and time schedule I had been given to teach was woefully inadequate in giving my students what they needed to succeed in careers after graduation.
▪ We can thus conclude that there is no common description or list of criteria for what industry needs and expects from interaction design education, just as there is no common description for an ideal interaction designer.
▪ These are distinct areas of practice reflective of formal disciplines that are already present in interaction design.
▪ Industry disagrees on what interaction designers should know
▪ Notwithstanding that warning (or perhaps ignorant to it), dozens of undergraduate and graduate degrees in human-computer interaction were established during and since that time to provide specialized training to students in the field of interaction design (Perlman 1999).
▪ Fry’s Computational Information Design process involves moving back and forth between steps to answer the underlying design question (2004)
▪ These various efforts are embodied in design methods and artifacts, while along the way, underlying theories and results emerge, an effect of following research through design (Barab and Squire 2004).
▪ The distinctions, while subtle, suggests that interaction design comes more from the designing arts, such as visual and communication design, and less from computing, and should focus less on the interface and more on the people using it. Similar sentiments from Winograd (1997) and Löwgren (2001, 2002) emphasize that while the medium of digital devices may remain the same, the path to improvement is through the design methods and approach of the “reflective practitioner” (Schön 1984).
▪ And because card sorting is best suited for smaller sets of labels, that made it impractical for the hundreds of competencies uncovered in this thesis.
▪ This broad embrace in the practice side of interaction design is also reflected in the eclecticism of research on the academic side, where some have argued that interaction design might be better treated as an “inter-discipline” (Reeves 2015) or “not even as a scientific field, but as a professional association, oriented toward practitioners as much as researchers” (Blackwell 2015 p.504).
▪ Academia disagrees on what interaction designers should be taught
▪ While analyzing the three datasets (interviews, degree programs, and job listings), it became clear that there were relatively few unifying skills or abilities that could adequately describe an interaction designer, and the ad hoc categorizations also failed to succinctly express what IxD education could or should provide by way of courses or knowledge areas to encompass all possible job needs.
▪ Both practitioners and academics agree that interaction design education is inadequate (although they don’t always agree why)
▪ “Human-computer interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.” (Hewett et al. 1992 p.5)
▪ Yet viewing subsequent presentations at the conference with this perspective, I noticed a clear divide between those which emphasized outcomes and those that focused on process, between what could be considered an industry mindset and an academic mindset.
▪ The literature as well uncovered multiple facets of an interaction designer’s job requirements, from research methods (Rogers 2004) to usability and user-centered design (Ji and Yun 2006) to ergonomics, agile development, and specific methods such as personas, wireframes, and card sorting (Hussein, Mahmud, and Tap 2014).
▪ Taken in the aggregate, the information gathered from the degree analysis provided very little toward answering the question of what industry wants and expects from interaction design education. The programs touched on so many different aspects of practicing interaction design that it was difficult to conclude that any one program or
▪ “Not everyone will come out as a professional designer, they just don't have the skills. I don’t want them to drop out school, but I need to help them see that this field might not be for them” (M Lahey 2016, personal communication, 3 March).
▪ Taken altogether, these factors led to the conclusion that establishing a common curriculum for interaction design would not reflect the breadth and diversity of interaction design within industry and academia
▪ Instead, a series of guiding factors materialized to better understand the reasons why these degree programs are so different, why industry job titles and descriptions disagree with one another, why companies emphasize portfolios and deemphasize degrees when hiring designers, and why interaction design education may never fully incorporate the breadth of what could be known about interaction design
▪ Yet the Jones model is not the only approach that could have been used. HumanCentered Design (HCD) and Goal-Directed Design (GDD) are other methodologies that designers can use in approaching research through the design, explained as follows
▪ Interaction design does not have a commonly agreed upon definition, with some even questioning whether it is a discipline of its own.
▪ Even for a large multinational company like IBM or Google (Bryant 2013), having a degree of any kind was not a requirement if the applicant had the evidence for skills and experience.
▪ The skills and knowledge required to practice interaction design exceeds what can taught
▪ Yet considering the variety of degree programs in interaction design, not to mention alternative learning paths such as certifications, online learning and self-study, these broad complaints simply cannot apply to all interaction design education.
▪ In fact, the first academic program officially named "Interaction Design" is believed to be the Master of Design in Interaction Design, established at Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 5--only two years after the ACM SIGCHI curriculum was published.
▪ As most of the literature pointed to HCI research as opposed to interaction design, this led to further exploration into the history of HCI itself and how interaction design differed. This was the first hint that perhaps one of the reasons interaction design professionals in the industry had issues with interaction (or HCI) education. Research professionals within academia couldn’t agree themselves.
▪ What if, instead of trying to arrive at the “one true” interaction design education, one instead seeks to understand why industry and academia fail to bridge the gap in interaction design education?
▪ When it comes to actual degree title, it was notable that across 176 degree programs, there were 101 unique names for the degree awarded. In addition to expected titles such as “Interaction Design”, “Human Factors” and “Human-Computer Interaction”, the titles ranged from simple (“Design”) to complex (“ICT Innovation Human Computer Interaction & Design (HCID)”), making it difficult to compare one degree to another.
▪ · Design Graphics, Interfaces, Interactions this domain refers to the conceptualization and design of both visual forms and behaviors encompassing both the static and dynamic nature of design (Faiola 2002). Design includes creating visualized artifacts and the creative and evaluative methods and thinking that accompanying that process
▪ Embarking on this master’s thesis, I wanted to uncover whether a standardized education in interaction design could be found. Or if it didn’t already exist, whether a standard set of classes, subjects, and skills could be combined into a degree program that would produce superior interaction designers, while accommodating for the tension between industry and academia.
▪ The first element is deciding what question is being asked. According to Fry (2004), too often the start of a visualization effort is simply having gathered large amounts of data and then wondering what to do with it. Instead, the approach should be to start with a question to be answered and then, in each stage, reflecting back to see whether any answers emerge.
▪ Based on the competencies themselves (see Table 19), 10 percent of them were mentioned in 50 percent or more of the listings--finally, a source that seemed to begin to answer the question of what industry expects from interaction design education (in contrast to degree programs where no course appeared in even 50 percent of the curricula).
▪ Interaction design degrees are unimportant in evaluating job candidates
▪ Overall, their responses matched the literature review, in that there were many differing views as to what schools should emphasize in their education and a general feeling among practitioners that IxD education was inadequate in providing the right kind of skills necessary for good design. Interestingly, the educators conceded some of those same points, and in a few cases suggested industry was to blame for expecting immediate productivity from graduates rather than providing on-the-job training and nurturing raw talent.
▪ As it turns out, the challenge of interaction design education isn’t that there is some sort of ideal “one size fits all” degree program, if only it could be discovered. The guiding factors developed to describe this problem space, explaining how and why an ideal interaction design education is a wicked problem, with contradictory perspectives on what is important and to whom
▪ While fields as diverse as architecture, nursing, and even hairdressing include some combination of academic education and professional licensing or credentialing, no such competency evaluation in interaction design has been created in either North America or Europe (Thomassen and Ozcan 2010).
▪ Affinity Diagrams With data gathered, the next step is to seek to make sense of it, and an affinity diagram is a useful method to use in this regard as it involves summarizing what is found and organizing it visually in a taxonomy to describe the content as a whole (Kolko 2011b).
▪ Unlike many other professional disciplines, there are no accreditation organizations specifically for interaction design that could potentially decide what an IxD curriculum should include.
▪ Although they hire based on the portfolio, interviewees who managed designers admitted that this wasn’t the best way to evaluate a candidate
▪ At the same time, one can also conclude that industry itself is not able to clearly describe what is expected of interaction designers when their own methods (primarily portfolios) inadequately assess people for interaction design jobs.
▪ I wondered, was one better than the other? Perhaps my 15 years as an interaction designer and manager “in the industry” had biased me against the academic approach she was endorsing and I wasn’t learning what I needed to from the master’s program I had begun. or maybe her theoretical viewpoint prevented her from validating the constraints of implementing interaction design in real-world situations and business settings.
▪ When doing so, one could see how certain areas simply had more breadth to them, which may explain why no particular course was taught more frequently--one school may have been emphasizing product design while another focused on service design, yet both were teaching design approaches
▪ The portfolio has the most influence in choosing who to interview
▪ And some is based on the instruction of the teachers as well. As a gentle nudge to educators in the early days of interaction design, Winograd reminded them that, “the purpose of education is to develop the student’s competence to take some kind of action. Often we lose sight of this in our eagerness to ‘transmit knowledge’ or ‘cover the material’” (Winograd 1990 p.444). Continuing, he said, “The vast majority of people we train in computer science (even those at the elite schools) will not go into academic research, but will play a variety of roles in the invention, production, implementation and use of new computing devices.” (ibid.)
▪ This issue relates to a potential shortcoming in understanding what, exactly, education in general should involve, with vocational education having a more professional focus on expected skills needed in the field while liberal education address more of higherorder thinking processes (Shinn 2014).
▪ Human-Centered Design (HCD), also known as User-Centered Design, places the user and context of use as the focus for all design decisions. Employing methods such as personas and ethnographic research and then further involving users as testers, reviewers, and even co-designers in co-creation sessions, HCD offers designers greater opportunity to profile users and understand their behaviors and preferences, and can be thought of as a collaborative effort between user and designer (Williams 2009).
▪ The job titles for the 850 listings were standardized based on common synonyms (e.g. The title “Digital Designer” was applied to listings for jobs such as “Senior Digital Designer”, “Digital Designer (Intermediate)” and “Digital Lead”). Quite a few of the job titles were dual-titled, such as “Interaction Designer/User Experience Designer” or “User Interface Designer /Researcher”, which required a further effort to separate the two sub-titles, clean and standardize those, and then reassemble them for purposes of filtering and analysis.
▪ The portfolio is a poor predictor of employee quality
▪ The Interaction Design Competency Framework formalizes these competency categories, presenting the results in a format that provides a simple overview of what areas are the most important for interaction design.
▪ However, that shift to design and a designerly way of thinking opens the practice of interaction design to encompass almost any subject (Buchanan 1992). Thus, no opposition emerges when researchers argue that interaction design should also include business, economics, social sciences, art, humanities, natural sciences and more (Culén 2015; Faiola 2007; Norman and Klemmer 2014).
▪ Instead, further investigation suggests that one of the main problems is that industry practitioners themselves disagree with each other on what interaction design education should include--for example, whether it should focus more on craft skills (Kolko 2011a) or whether there’s already too much craft (Norman and Klemmer 2014).
▪ However, to bridge the gap between academia and industry, it was important to figure out a way to unite these different elements, and the idea of a matrix of skills and abilities emerged.
▪ Befitting the multi-disciplinary background of interaction design, these various degree programs emerged from different education disciplines and school departments6 as well.
And because of these different backgrounds--be it computer science, art, psychology, etc.--they each emphasize varying aspects of interaction design over another, preventing consensus about what should be standard content (Cooper et al. 2014).
▪ Summarizing their findings, they described continued tensions in the multidisciplinary nature of the field, challenges between breadth and depth of knowledge, gaps between academia and industry, and contradictory desires for a standardized yet flexible curriculum.
▪ Job competency models offer a potential tool for standardizing and evaluating skills
▪ It’s not just industry that lacks consensus on what an interaction designer should know; academia as well interprets interaction design across a broad spectrum of knowledge areas and subsequently teaches it in many different ways.
▪ Required Courses Intro to Interaction Design (Art History + History of Design)
▪ The final model to consider for job competency is one actually geared toward structuring interaction design education instead: The Design Enterprise Model (DEM). As its creator explains it, “DEM extends the potential of HCI by emphasizing design as a unifier for managing knowledge domains” (Faiola 2007 p.34) and does so by applying theory, application and management to four specific knowledge areas: social science, design, business, and computing (see Figure 7).
▪ However, rather than use these prototyping methods sequentially, from less detailed to more complete, this project followed a more effective approach to first consider the “most important open design questions” and then choose a prototyping method that would best answer those questions (Houde and Hill 1997 p.368).
▪ Interaction design lacks a unifying disciplinary core The principles and concepts of interaction design developed concurrently and separately across other existing fields of practice and research, such as human factors, engineering, computing and library management (Shackel 1997, Grudin 2008). Yet even as researchers and professionals from these separate fields recognized their common interests and affinities under the umbrella term “human-computer interaction” (in the 1980’s) and “interaction design” (1990’s), they considered
▪ Introduction to User Experience
▪ To create an affinity diagram, relevant quotes, phrases, or keywords are written down on post-it notes (with one insight per note) and then grouped together as patterns emerge (see Figure 11). This allows the process to proceed quickly as knowledge is produced and fortified.
▪ While these parts may not individually amount to much, taken collectively, they create a more complete picture of the initial problem and amount to a series of solutions that--while not solving the entire problem--might provide some results that are “good enough” for now.
▪ · Computing Programming, Functionality, Performance this domain addresses the technical aspects of implementing a design into workable code or interface, whether in front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript), programming, or tangible electronic device.
▪ Design (Schematics) Sketching
▪ Interestingly, the skill or aspect with the most mentions across all job listings was “collaborative” or the ability of the employee to cooperate and work with others, an attribute or personality trait rather than some knowledge or concrete skill that could be tested against.
▪ Because these so-called wicked problems typically lead to resolutions that are “good enough” rather than ideal (if they even lead to that), the fact that the result does not definitively answer the question of what specific skills industry needs from IxD education is not an indication of failure.
▪ Additional exploration included IxD curriculum development and evaluation, pedagogical methods (such as studio work), educational and learning frameworks, and research into student-job readiness. This process revealed a slight bias toward the perspectives and approaches of academia itself, with an emphasis on methods for pedagogical improvement and not as much on practitioner understanding.
▪ Fairly quickly into the process, I encountered three challenges to interaction design education, as follows.
▪ Rather than a list of specific competencies required for an interaction designer to know or do, a framework representing a range of capabilities could be used to evaluate and situate a job listing or degree program within the expected competency areas
▪ This framework structure then makes it possible to summarize the emphases of a given job, job category or degree program, as well as provide a mechanism for comparing them with one another-something that wasn’t possible before.
▪ The challenge is that there are multiple ways to interpret what it means to be an interaction designer, and multiple ways to educate an interaction designer, and before now, there hasn’t been a clear way to visualize these differences.
▪ This has led some to argue that a formal education is not necessarily at all, a poor substitute for dedicated practice and on-thejob experience (Rutledge 2010; Six 2012), a sentiment shared in the interviews too.
▪ Research Methods
▪ Interaction design degree programs emerged in the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s from different disciplines and school departments, including engineering and architecture (Grudin 2008; Shackel 1997), and emphasize more of those fields’ areas of focus than a common set of content (Cooper et al. 2014).
▪ And without a clearer understanding of what is expected of interaction design practitioners, formal IxD education will continue to be considered inadequate by managers in the field (Six 2012).
▪ From these thoughts, an underlying question emerged: what makes a good interaction designer? and by extension, what makes a good interaction design (IxD) education program?
▪ The first challenge to interaction design education is accurately recognizing where these tensions exist. One might assume that the primary problem is between industry and academia, the so-called “gap” resulting because the two sides have different expectations of what an interaction designer should do.
▪ Thus, by the late 1970’s, these four educational disciplines--psychology, engineering, computer science and library management--had begun to produce the broad fields of practice in human factors, ergonomics, computing, and information science (Figure 1)--ancestors and cousins to human computer interaction.
▪ Competence, in the context of a job, refers to how well a person uses their various skills, knowledge, and attitudes to accomplish specific tasks or objectives (Karmel 1993; Vinke 2002, cited by Yang, You & Chen 2005).
▪ Instead of defining the subject area more clearly, interaction design researchers, instructors, and practitioners are encouraged to become more multi-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary as they apply design to more and more disciplines and projects (Adamczyk and Twidale 2007; Blevis and Stolterman 2009; Churchill, Bowser & Preece 2013) (see also Figure 3).
▪ However, because each insight is limited by the size of the note, it means the writing must be brief, potentially reducing the amount of insight that can be gathered from such a diagram.
▪ · Research Observing, Interpreting, Evaluating this domain focuses on the efforts required to understand and respond to external information when creating or implementing a design, such as ethnographic work, user testing, and data analysis
▪ A series of questions were created beforehand, chosen to elicit their opinions on what was important for students to learn in school, what skills they needed to be successful, and where they saw the gaps for recent graduates entering the workforce
▪ The International Organization for Standardization, in ISO 9241-210, gives a specific process for conducting human-centered design projects that focused on understanding the user’s needs and context of use and from there determining user requirements and designing against those requirements (see Figure 9).
▪ Using some set of standard descriptions, one interaction design job could be considered more “research-oriented” because it required skills like ethnography, interviewing and user testing, while another interaction design job could be considered more “design-oriented” because it emphasized graphic tools or visual artifacts. The task then was to determine how to best categorize this information in a way that would uncover differences between job listings and IxD degrees in a way that reflected the real distinctions.
▪ Additionally, the other highly mentioned competencies were less about specific tools and more about approaches and resulting artifacts
▪ It approaches a topic or domain and applies relevant dimensions to reach a level of understanding (Rauterberg 2006). Frameworks do not take a particular form or shape, nor do they explain an entire ecosystem or prescribe specific methods. Yet a framework does more than just describe a possible reality the way a theory does; it also offers an orientation that can be flexibly applied in further research and action
▪ As it turns out, this is neither an easy problem to solve, nor is it a novel one. The tension between academia and industry has existed since human-computer interaction
▪ Academics within interaction design also disagree on what schools should be teaching, with such notables as Jon Kolko requesting more craft skills (2001a) and Don Norman arguing for less (Norman and Klemmer 2014).
▪ This may seem obvious, yet it’s an important element to remember when considering what interaction design education should do. At its most fundamental, education is about both imparting knowledge and improving a student’s ability (Shinn 2014), yet in those two dimensions are two additional problems relating to interaction design education.
▪ While the DEM doesn’t address specific aspects of a worker’s job activities, such as attitudes and behaviors or mindsets, it nevertheless introduces the need for different orders of thinking and situates business demands and expectations as part of the competencies a job in interaction design could entail.
▪ To consider the future of IxD education one should begin with the past. As exhaustively detailed by Grudin (2008) and Shackel (1997), the beginnings of interaction design education predate the ACM SIGCHI curricula and can be found in the very beginning efforts of the “management science” movement.
▪ That said, the gap between academia and industry is not unique to interaction design, and many other fields have performed extensive studies of student post-graduation competencies and career readiness. These include studies from engineering (Martin, et al. 2005; Schneider, Johnston & Joyce 2005), game development (McGill 2009), industrial design (Lewis and Bonollo 2002; Yang, You & Chen 2005), and even travel and tourism (Conradie 2012)
▪ Competencies, then, can be used as a catch-all term to describe any of these specific designations, and understanding how others group and organize competencies provides some insight into how a similar structure could be used for interaction design (which this thesis does in Ch. 5 Execution Process: Competency Framework).
▪ Then, rather than assigning a specific set of criteria for all interaction designers, it instead proposes a matrix of competencies that reflects the ways that different programs and jobs may choose to interpret interaction design differently. This framework is intended to make it easier to understand and explain the concepts, skills, and information that IxD education should be imparting to students.
▪ And even by breaking down just the industry side of the equation, further quasi-subjects emerge, such as designer ability, industry need, employer expectation, contextual demand, client requirement, and technological progress. As such, this thesis does not attempt to solve the wicked problem of the gap between academia and industry and instead tries to provide a “good enough” solution for understanding so that further work can be performed.
▪ Interestingly, more than half (39) of those job titles were “dual titles”, and in fact, if one examines the total count of all jobs listed, nearly 20 percent of the them were for these kinds of positions.
▪ This lack of a disciplinary core manifests itself in ways beyond just the history and research literature of interaction design. The first to consider is how practitioners within industry interpret what knowledge and skills are expected from interaction designers.
▪ While this assumption is somewhat correct, it ignores the problem that academics themselves don’t agree on what interaction design should cover as a discipline, leading to degree programs with considerably different subjects, methods, and practices (Glushko 2008).
▪ Business Managing, Planning, Marketing this domain concentrates on the practices and methods for introducing a design into the marketplace and how timelines, staffing, and financial resources impact that. It is also concerned with how an organization can effectively use design to provide value through the direct creation of products and services, and how business strategies can inform the direction a design should take as it addresses market needs.
▪ Information visualizations (infovis) can include anything from data-derived bar charts and scatter plots to more conceptual representations like flow charts and affinity diagrams, yet the best infovis
▪ IxD skills from interview Tool-set Prototyping Design Tools Photoshop Sketch Illustrator
▪ In this way, one can determine what industry needs and expects from not just education but from any interaction designer, who in turn can better prepare for jobs in interaction design.
▪ The first widely recommended curriculum for an HCI undergraduate course wasn’t a single curriculum at all; instead, it was designed to be used modularly, with different parts to be taught or not depending on the degree program, be it psychology or computer science (Hewett et al. 1992).
▪ The closest support is a meta-analysis of jobs across a variety of fields, which showed that work sample tests (in which a candidate performs specific tasks as part of the job interview process itself) were moderately associated with job performance (r=.54), slightly higher than structured interviews and general mental ability (GMA) scores (both with r=.51) (Schmidt and Hunter 1998). Confirming how well a portfolio or degree predicts designer’s job performance is outside the scope of the thesis, yet points to need for having clear measures of a designer’s knowledge and skills so that industry can adequately evaluate interaction designers.
▪ The bewildering variety of job titles and job descriptions makes it almost overwhelming for anyone to get an adequate picture of what, exactly, an interaction designer should know and thereby craft a valid educational program to address it.
▪ As for why degrees aren’t important, interviewees said there was no way to know from the degree alone what skills or abilities an applicant had. Research literature also points to the inconsistency between programs to understand what skills a candidate may or may not have (Churchill, Bowser, and Preece 2013), as well as the rapid changes in technology that make taught skills less relevant (Lian-nan, Yu-long & Jiaxun 2015; Shinn 2014) and the fact that current practitioners’ own lack of degrees makes them less inclined to consider degrees as a deciding factor (Six 2012).
▪ It is against this backdrop of fuzzy definitions and vague boundaries between disciplines that we find the explosion of titles and terms used for occupations relating to interaction design. In addition to common titles such as information architect, user researcher, interaction designer, and UX designer (Putnam and Kolko 2012), this new era of interaction design includes such multi-disciplinary positions as XD researcher, experience designer, visual interaction designer, interactive mechanical developer, medical ethnographic researcher, and more (IxDA Job Board).
▪ And while Glushko (2008) argues that all disciplines--from business to medicine--have unique variations dependent on the institutions in which they are taught and the instructors which teach them, he also emphasizes that these differences are small and often countered by accrediting organizations which standardize curricula for the given field. Interaction design has no such standard pedagogical reference or accrediting organization (Thomassen and Ozcan 2010).
▪ Efforts to understand the effectiveness of interaction design education have typically come from researchers within academia itself and have focused on evaluating various pedagogical approaches on students alone and then sharing those findings (Abdelnour-Nocera, et al. 2013; Culén 2015; Or-Bach 2015; Reimer and Douglas 2003; Sas and Dix 2007). or they study specific behaviors in practice to then describe
▪ Coding Skills HTML/CSS Javascript
▪ It is perhaps instructive to note that for those job listings that said a degree was not required, 8 of the 9 were for jobs in either San Francisco or New York, both highly competitive job markets
▪ Mind-set Curious
▪ This resulted in a dataset of 176 programs, against which certain high-level examinations could be conducted, such as what the degree is called (“HCI” vs “interaction design”), what degree type they are (MS vs MA vs MDes), and what kind of school or department manages the program (for an example, see Table 2
▪ Empathy Optimistic Open-minded Business-minded Skill-set Ethnography
▪ From the high-level review of 850 job listings within interaction design, 332 unique job titles were found, and after standardizing these titles to remove minor differences (ex. “Senior Interaction Designer” vs. “Interaction Design Lead”), 75 exclusive categories for a job title remained. Of these, more than half used a “dual title” such as “Interaction Designer/User Experience Designer” or “User Interface Designer/Researcher” to describe the job role
▪ The first--imparting knowledge--is not just difficult for the reasons mentioned above. Another reason is the sheer breadth of skills and knowledge expected to be acquired in the short period of time a degree occurs
▪ Gestalt--which means “pattern” in German--describes how our minds organize perceptual information (Ware 2012). By utilizing these organizational laws, including principles such as proximity, similarity, connectedness, and closure (see Figure 14), one can influence a visualization to indicate relationships beyond just using labels, color, shapes, or other signifiers.
▪ Observation Interviewing
▪ And research shows that job competency models are an effective way to evaluate job positions, educational programs, and the individuals that participate (Ennis 2008).
▪ Without that consensus, schools will continue to produce graduates in interaction design that differ drastically in skills, leading to the second challenge: people in industry with the title of “interaction designer” also don’t share the same knowledge and abilities.
▪ Interpreting data Socio-cultural acumen
▪ While North Americans preferred to use “Interaction Designer” or a dual title, Europeans and Asians used “User Experience Designer”, “UI/UX Designer” or “User Interface Designer” with proportionally greater frequency
▪ And while a recent effort from the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Development Group to update the curricula acknowledged that a standardized curriculum or degree would make it easier for industry to know what skills students have, they concluded that a “living curriculum” without specific courses was a better approach (Churchill, Bowser & Preece 2013).
▪ Collaboration, not capitulation
▪ And though the fields differ, the best elements of these studies asked questions about business challenges, soft skills, learning on the job, and expectations vs. reality, and use the language and terminology that is from industry, not academia.
▪ Culture making
▪ Unlike general evaluations which may cover any number of website design elements, usability tests focus particularly on how well a website user performs specific tasks
▪ Despite rigorous searching and numerous secondary citations, the author could find no definitive proof that the first HCI program called “interaction design” was, indeed, at CMU in 1994.
▪ Broadly speaking, education can be divided into two types: general education and professional education. General (or liberal) education encompasses a variety of subjects and materials and is intended to train students in the ability to frame concepts in historical contexts, think critically, communicate effectively, and work independently and cooperatively, regardless of the field (Shinn 2014). Professional (or vocational) education, in contrast, has a more focused intent:
▪ Public speaking
▪ Expressing ideas
▪ Considering the thesis results, this project answers the question of “what is the ideal interaction design education” with the somewhat ineffectual answer of “it doesn’t exist.”
▪ Writing Documentation
▪ · People Communicating, Empathizing, Motivating this domain looks into the social and cognitive elements that make up individual and collective human processes, from the perspective of interpersonal interaction and collaboration (rather than research)
▪ As Churchill, Bowser, and Preece (2013 p.46) describe the situation, it was, “more a guild of researchers from various disciplines than a discipline in itself.”
▪ Knowledge-set Design Thinking Aesthetics Whitespace
▪ And industry is no better at resolving exactly what an interaction designer should know either; instead of agreeing to some sort of common credentials, they have instead taken to creating job titles that are more like word salads than actual
▪ Layout Color Theory
Screen resolution Hiearchy
▪ By measuring the performance of these tasks against Nielsen’s base metrics--success rate, completion time, error rate, and satisfaction--one can understand precisely how a given feature or function on a website performs (Nielsen 2001).
▪ While this is frustrating on a personal level, the guiding factors provide a way of thinking about the problem in broader terms, describing not only why such an answer doesn’t exist, but also why such a question is fraught with problems itself.
▪ Despite the lack of consensus within either industry or academia for what an interaction designer should know and what should be taught, both sides of the divide
▪ The job listing analysis identified 200-plus competencies that were required from across the postings, with an average of 36 unique competencies per job. This makes the likelihood of establishing a single degree program to teach all of these a mathematical impossibility.
▪ All industry interviewees said that the portfolio was the most important tool they use to determine who to interview, even going so far as to ignore the résumé or CV entirely, except perhaps as a keyword filtering tool to find candidates whose portfolios might then be considered
▪ Knowledge refers to factual or procedural information as applied to a task
▪ Without accrediting boards to standardize educational programs or licensing bodies to certify ability, and without a consensus on what a degree should entail or what skills are necessary for a designer to know to practice interaction design, one is left with little to understand and compare what industry needs and expects from interaction design education.
▪ Skill refers to mental, verbal or physical actions or behaviors required to perform a task
▪ When it comes to exploring how this content and data can be best organized and subsequently presented in a design, sketching is a fundamental method for designers. With sketching, a designer can create multiple ideas quickly without concern for quality, and then use these concepts for discussion with others and further assessment 9 for example, ReadMe (http://gking.harvard.edu/readme) and Lexicoder (http://www.lexicoder.com/)
▪ Ability refers to capability or competence shown when performing a task
▪ From the academic literature, assessing a student’s skills can be difficult to evaluate for areas of aesthetics (Yang, You & Chen 2005) as can the teacher’s ability to further cultivate or enhance those abilities in the classroom or studio setting (Culén, Mainsah