Session Title
It’s not a hammer, dammit! Rethinking computers and interaction design education
Presenter
Al Wasco, Cuyahoga Community College
Session Type: Discussion
A crippling metaphor often comes up when we talk about whether design education should include teaching computer/software skills: “the computer is just a tool.”
If the computer is basically a hammer, it follows then that the professor doesn’t need to spend his/her valuable time teaching which end is the handle. There are plenty of books and tutorials, the argument goes, so that students can learn on their own. It’s not that complicated.
I have concerns about students learning bad habits and inefficient techniques when their goal is limited to accomplishing a specific task or two. But rather than debate that I’d like to talk about design education using a completely different metaphor.
I suggest that we think about the computer/software as a musical instrument and designers as performers (or composers or conductors). We can abandon the craft-based approach (hammers) and think about performance (instruments) instead. This isn’t as outlandish as it may seem: live head-to-head design competitions like Cut & Paste and Adobe Pixel Mash are becoming the Iron Chef shows of the design world.
Using this approach we can look at the music world for models of how to teach the craft of design (performance), design thinking (music theory), design strategy (composition) and design management (conducting).
I invite interaction designers, educators, musicians, composers and banjo pickers to a jam session: we’ll share ideas about how we can teach and learn how to play our instruments.
Biography
Al Wasco is Assistant Professor of Visual Communication and Design with a focus on Interactive Media at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. He recently completed a year-long sabbatical, part of which was spent traveling around the country and talking with design educators and students about how we teach and learn design. Additional research includes online surveys completed by 150 design educators and 300 design students from across the country.
After more than twenty years as a print designer he fell in love with interactive media and has taught it full time since 1996. He bought one of the first Macintosh computers and has seen the computer/software evolve from an extension of our hands to an extension of our brains. He’s pretty sure we could do a better job of educating interaction designers. He has no musical talent whatsoever.
One Comment
I hear that “just a tool” line all the time. Yeah, the computer’s a tool, but so’s a particle accelerator. Even a hammer needs some explanation the first time you come across one.
A computer’s guts may not be that complicated (debatable), but the workflow and the power it provides certainly is. I work in a prepress department, and I see a lot of misuses of this simple tool. So when I teach a graphics class, I explain everything from folder/directory structure to what happens to your files downstream (when the printer or webmaster has to deal with them). I love tutorials — lynda.com is what I use to teach classes. But tutorials won’t take care of most computer-related problems. And the hammer analogy doesn’t stand a chance.