Designing Learning Opportunities in Interaction Design: Interactionaries as a means to study and teach student design processes

Learning by practice, apprenticeship and paradigmatic examples have been prime paths for learning within interaction design. These have been criticized for being time-consuming and costly, of not being implementable in academic contexts. In this article we suggest and evaluate a pedagogical model to address these problems in design teaching and learning. Results from a time-constrained collaborative design exercise, a so-called “interactionary”, are presented. Student design work is analyzed using the framework of learning design sequences and analysis of the primary transformation unit shows that interactionaries reveal patterns in student design work. Materials are used mainly to document design ideas rather than as a design material to further investigate design ideas and aspects of interaction. In the critiquing sessions, regarded as the secondary transformation unit, many issues hardly addressed during the design work were brought up. Thus, the designers continued to develop their design proposal primed by critique presented by the reviewers. Based on the results, possible teacher interventions to coach student design work are suggested.