Multipurpose Room: What Gradulate Schools Are Teaching

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

What Gradulate Schools Are Teaching

This is a panel discussion with profs from the above Grad Programs.

IIT has about 100 students. Have a 9 month intensive program and Phd program.

UofB. Two graduate programs and two certificate (IA and New Media Publishing). Designed for working professionals. All are weekend and evenings. Most are part time and it takes about two and three years.

Remarkable facilities across the university. Undergraduate has industrial design program. Two masters degrees and a PhD program.: communication planning design and interaction design Program is two years long. Second year is thesis paper.

Why Graduate Schools or an Academic Arm for the Profession?

The credentialing system enhances the professor. Also universities can take the long view because they are not project driven. Also do research that is readily available.

How are you schools ahead of the curve?

CMC: Service design is probably ahead of industry but maybe not Europe. Robotics and elder care. Integrating students from HCI, design and business the first year.

UB: Practice of participatory design is ahead because of the time requirements that a University can do that most business can not. Also, specialized audiences – we are doing young adults.

ITT: Always searching for new methods and processes. Students are now working on incentive designs. Also risk mitigation within an organization.

Design has become so broad what do you teach in two years?

CMU: Give the students the framing for how to work in the future. Try to include the range of methods. “Like eating your vegetables.”

UB: “Like an exercise machine.” It is fundamentally different than training. These fields did not exist in the 70s. They still have a lot of training to do when they get their first job, but they have learned how to frame the problem and find tools to use.

ITT: Critical thinking is what any program provides.

Designers are graduating without hard skills, it appears to me (audience member) like a site map, wire frames and other documentation.

UB: We teach them deliverables.

Traincheck is not my day job and we do mobile interface. How is mobile space changing thing?

CMU: Do what is needed in the world – two or three focus projects were mobile. Everything is going to be connected so mobile is part.

UB: Students must consider beyond the beige box. Actually technologies to play with is a budget problem. We also have a program focusing on inner city Baltimore.

ITT: Mobile has shifted student projects beyond the magic

Accessible HTML?

UB: How else would you teach it?

Design to save lives, democracy and poverty. Do Universities try to tackle these since industry is working on different programs? Will stay with it after school?

ITT: Bottom of the pyramid is a project in rural India and China. This is also a future business opportunity.

UB: We can not tell students to work for nothing. I think the answer is the open course community. We have course to examine the cultural implications.

CMU: Hard for them to have potential employers see the non-profit work as useful to their career.

How did you get into the academic environment as a career?

ITT: I came through consulting. Director asked me to teach a few classes and took opportunity for full time position.

UB: I’ve been an prof my whole life. We do hire people. Read the catalog and contact the department chair.

CMU: I was consultant for a long time. I had opportunity to take a year long stint as a chair. Lucky enough when the position opened up.

How did these programs start? Who championed it?

CMU: Recognized that there was a need internally. Two rounds of gathering input from the field.

UB: Ours was born out of Comm. Design program frustration that was very print oriented. So we were hired to do electronic. Difficulty getting them part of core, so we moved into it and got a new school.

ITT: Have always been in the shadow of architecture. Always need to distinguish itself and worked with faculty and board when moved out of the architecture building.

Panel Description