Fall Teaching (Part 1: Before)

Plenty of us of are wondering if we’re participating in a profession, a community, a society, that’s becoming something else.

In less than a month I’ll be back in the classroom, standing in front of a room full of students.

There’s a course number, a title, attendance policy, and all that.

But I’m not sure what I’ll actually be teaching.

In large part, because I’m not sure what these students should be learning.

Conversations about AI are prompting some of this confusion. But it would be too easy to say AI is disrupting teaching and learning. Really, AI is just an accelerant, making the light brighter on the issue. If AI had a smell, it would smell like gasoline.

There’s a bigger misalignment that’s been happening for a while.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know how to teach. The problem seems to be that there are now very different demands on what education is supposed to do.

And this isn’t just about teaching. Plenty of us of are wondering if we’re participating in a profession, a community, a society, that’s becoming something else.

The course is Design Foundations and it’s part of a required sequence for incoming Master’s students. All the incoming Master’s students in Human-Computer Interaction take this course, and it’s only those students. In many ways, there’s a shared ground among the students that should make teaching the class easier. The problem is, I’m not sure I share that ground.

This is a professional Master’s program. Students enroll because they want a particular kind of job when they graduate in two years.

I no longer fully understand what that job is, and much what I do understand, I’m leery of.

The expectations of the job market make this all a bit more consequential and difficult.

Students begin the process of looking for summer internships in January. These summer internships are crucial because the 1^st year summer internship can lead to a job offer after graduation. Even if not, that 1^st year Summer internship can be a distinguishing feature of experience and prestige that helps them get the job they want, or think they want. To apply for those internships, they need a portfolio of industry relevant work, by January.

This is a challenge because in those first classes they are, or should be, learning. And learning involves taking wrong turns and making mistakes. But there’s very little time for that when the outcome of those classes, in the form of portfolio projects, is perceived to be so crucial. Add to this that students believe (and they may be correct) that those projects must be fairly formulaic, they have to display fairly circumscribed processes and results.

In other words, they have to demonstrate professional expertise in design in sixteen weeks, and that demonstration has to look enough like everyone else’s’ expertise to be legible, but also, somehow, stand out.

We could summarize the situation neatly. “Students need to learn. Industry needs evidence they already know.” That’s true, but the situation isn’t quite that neat. These institutions of knowledge and work—like many institutions—seems to be drifting further apart, while the ground is also shaking,

Part of me wants to say “That’s not my problem.” And that’s true. It’s not. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I’m not being paid by industry to train to their workers. That’s not my job.

But part of me also feels a responsibility to the students.

About a quarter of these students have design degrees. The rest come from computer science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere. For most of them, this is their first design class.

Which is to say there’s a lot to learn of Design Fundamentals. There are ways to introduce these over that semester, so that students can work to develop them throughout the remainder of their graduate education. But those ways don’t always, or at least not easily, translate into a professional portfolio projects.

Yes, AI complicates this. Take a topic such as information hierarchy and how to convey that through typography. This is still important knowledge. There are many exercises to learn and practice those principles. At the same time, students can prompt a visual mockup in less than a minute. What would have previously taken students two to three hours of wrestling with a tool and exploring compositions is done in about the same amount of time it takes to flush a toilet. Are they missing out on learning? Absolutely. Does that matter for their jobs? I don’t know. From what I hear, maybe not.

Then there’s the character of contemporary design.

Increasingly, I find myself asking not simply whether students can do the work, but whether they should want to do the work.

So much of it is surveillance and extraction. One could reasonably argue that design has always been (at least in part) about seduction. But so much of design today is unabashedly surveillance and extraction. At least, so much of the work these students are off to do.

We don’t need 1000 pages to explain surveillance capitalism. I could just show you a few projects. It’s not just disappointing, it’s frankly scary and exhausting.

Of course, this isn’t all of design. But does seem to be a lot of UX design in Big Tech, which is where many of these students are off to.

And I’m well aware that the core and bulk of design has always been service to industry. I’m not here to naively damn design or UX.

I’m just sharing my uncertainty about what it is I’m supposed to be doing, while I’m taking a break from moving things around in the syllabus.

Maybe the simplest and most responsible thing for me to do is to stop teaching this class.

But I don’t want to, at least not yet.

The question that keeps swirling around in my head is “When institutions, expectations, and cultures drift, who gets to decide the way forward? And do we have to follow?”

…..

As I keep trying to redesign the course, I’m realizing that every iteration assumes something I no longer trust.

And I’ve come to conclusion that I’m making the same mistake I often tell students they’re making—I’m assuming we (I) have to teach (or design) to expectations. But we don’t.

In fact, maybe, part of my responsibility is not doing that.

…..

Now I have to remake the rubrics.

…..

By the way, if you happen to be a student taking my class, don’t worry. It’ll be great.