Teaching design of complex interactive systems: Learning by Interacting

In this paper we document our experiences in developing and teaching design classes. The courses we teach, and that we still try to improve and try to keep up with state of the art design approaches, originaly developed in close cooperation with colleagues like Michael Tauber and Steve Guest. Only in a way of cooperation we will be able to improve and to produce state of the art education.

Teaching interactive systems design in our situation means teaching various groups of university students, as well as groups of experienced practitioners, in most cases stemming from a variety of disciplines like software engineering, electrical engineering, cognitive psychology, and AI.

Our current design classes are organised in such a way that students are forming a design team with subteams for different specialist design methods like task analysis, formal modeling, prototyping, usability evaluation, and requirements analysis. The team collaborates in an iterative manner, starting from an initial statement from a real client and ending with the presentation of a complete design (including design rationales, working prototype that is evaluated, but also including organisational re-design and possible video scenarios.