Adaptive Path Blog

How do you teach people who already know a lot? That’s the dilemma I’ve been facing lately in my Designing for Interaction Workshops. The workshops seem to be well-received by people with some exposure to interaction design and a few years of experience. But practitioners with more than say, five year’s of experience have sometimes walked away unsatisfied. They feel they know a lot of what I’ve gone over, even if it’s revelatory for many others there. I’ve occasionally gotten a similar reaction to the book as well: That it is a great overview and introduction, but its usefulness for experienced designers is somewhat limited.

These are valid critiques. The book, from which most of the workshop material is drawn, is a primer — by design. I based it off the class I taught at Carnegie Mellon, which was an introductory course. Unless it is a really long book (the polar bear book and About Face 2.0 spring to mind) and/or multi-day workshops, overviews by their nature just expose only some of the subject matter and the major issues surrounding it. Depth and a high level of detail are a different beast entirely. In university, it’s the difference between a survey course and a seminar class on a single topic.

What I’m considering is the idea of a series of Adaptive Path Master Classes, similar to what is done in the fine arts. This would be in addition to the existing D4I workshops, which will be as they are now: Mostly focused on beginning and intermediate interaction designers in a larger workshop setting, with a combination of exercises and lectures. The Master Classes would be a different format — one that is smaller (~12 people), more intense, and solely for experienced practitioners. Each master class would focus on one major topic, and feature pre-session readings and prep work, possibly some “homework,” and engage deeply with a single problem or problem space. Potential topics would be things like:

Of course, this is just a list off the top of my head. One can see other Adaptive Path Master Classes on a wide variety of topics in design strategy, research, and information architecture.Please leave a comment whether or not something like this would appeal to you and what topics you might be interested in. If there is enough interest, we’ll look into doing some in 2007.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Conference Commentary, Upcoming Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This post is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.