How to Teach Interaction Design

Through Jeff, I found an old post of Chad's that had an amazing comment from one of our classmates, Maggie Breslin. Since she inexplicably doesn't have a blog and her comment is pretty buried, I'm quoting it at length here. This is her advice to Chad about how to teach interaction design:

Chad! Did you learn nothing in your time here in Pittsburgh? He wants to be an interaction designer and you gave him some articles from Cooper and uiweb?

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

You tell him I said to take a long unstructured walk around his city. Talk to strangers. Take pictures. Visit at least one museum. Pretend like he's from somewhere else for an hour. Stop in a park to read Raymond Carver's "What we talk about when we talk about love." (outloud would be rad, but I leave that up to him.) Go into a music store, find two people who seem completely different from him and buy whatever they are buying. And then end his travels at your house where he'll tell you the story of his day over a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin. The story should last as long as the bottle.

You listen to his story and then like Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid" tell him all the things he already knows interaction design without even realizing it.

And to answer the question before you ask - why Bombay Sapphire Gin? Gin because it's yummy. Bombay Sapphire because it's beautiful. We're still designers after all. ;)

Amen.

Originally posted at Thursday, April 20, 2006 | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)