Part of my application to teach at the California College of the Arts, was supplying a teaching statement and a point of view on interaction design as a practice. Here you can find what I wrote in my application.
Point of view on interaction design as a practice
Interaction design is a discipline that is becoming more and more relevant, not because, or not just because of the advent of complex interaction domains like spatial computing or interactions with artificial intelligence, but because it connects the dots between many other disciplines like media studies, computer science, hardware engineering, sociology, philosophy.
We already have experienced the impact of interaction design in society (I am not going to mention any of these impacts, it would go beyond the purpose of this document) but I think interaction design can bring more positive change if practiced with thoughtfulness and understanding of the overall societal fabric and move the narrative from user-centered design to designing for sustainability. Interaction designers are the architects of the digital world, and as the digital world moves closer and closer to blending completely with the analog reality, the product of interaction design has repercussions beyond bits and bytes. In fact, interaction designers are called to take responsibility for the interfaces they create and expose the model of operations of their services and products. When you buy an item on the internet, today's interfaces are not communicative of the system that lies underneath, the user doesn't know where those items are coming from, who's handling them, etc.. Similarly, when purchasing a piece of art through blockchain the user doesn't know that that transaction has a substantial environmental impact. Even more, users don't think that simply by liking or reposting something on social media they could be part of fueling the spread of misinformation. These are big opportunities for interaction design to offer more transparent interfaces to expose the consequence behind the pixels and emerge, as a practice, as a force for good.
On the other side, big tech companies dictate the forms of interactions with our digital devices. When interaction design is not just about devices but transitions to homes, cars, streets, cities, it's important to highlight the role of design as a connector between technology and society, taking into consideration people and the planet. To do that interaction design shall continue to build tools for creativity and imagination that go above and beyond what is already supplied by the corporate world and advocate for counterculture in cyber-culture.
For the above point to succeed scholars and practitioners should continue to strive to understand society and the evolution of interpersonal interactions when mediated by interactive technologies and use this knowledge to generate appropriate interfaces. To be impactful, the tools for generation should remain accessible, possibly open-source, and should not echo any dominant and established stream of operation. That's why I believe that tool building is still an essential part of the interaction design practice and I hope to see more of it spawning in the future.
Teaching statement
I studied design at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design where interdisciplinarity, multiethnicity, and studio culture were some of the principles that were central to the experience of being a student at CIID. These principles offered an inclusive and energetic environment where every student felt invested in learning and pushing themselves and others. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to grow as a designer in that context and I've carried that with me when teaching back to CIID and other institutions.
I believe that the qualities of an interaction designer should be: computer literacy, sketching in software and hardware, empathy for the user and capacity to design for others, being deeply interested in the consequences of the work in society, and having an intuition for beauty and delight.
As an instructor and practitioner, I'm interested in sharing a path to improve in parallel across all these qualities, rather than striving for hyper-specialization.
I believe in learning by doing, and I think it's of fundamental importance for interaction designers to refine their craft, to be more expressive and more impactful. The ambition is to make as many assignments as possible to have a practical component; yet time will be dedicated to peers-critique and SMEs-critique and these will offer opportunities for reflection. One of my favorite quotes says that "the only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday" (Bill Buxton, 2007) and I think interaction designers have the power to architect the future by sketching and prototyping experiences that are not here yet. The more convincing we are at sketching and prototyping the more impactful we will be in influencing the future to include our ideas and values.
Moreover, I believe that to truly succeed as a designer, there is a need not just in the application of craft, but in the creation of knowledge as well. I'm passionate about the history of interaction design and interactivity, and I believe that looking at previous work and historical references it's the best way to confront old and new problems and build a body of knowledge that we can embed in the digital artifacts and services that we are going to design. To support this belief I've been building a space for reflection and conversation called museumofinteractivity.com, aimed at sharing, in a playful way, important ideas that have made computation what we know it today.