Interaction Design

INTERACTION DESIGN AT THE CORCORAN

Interaction designers make the products, services, and interfaces that shape our world to be more useful, more delightful, more accessible and more equitable. 

Are you a designer who wants to:

• Build new mobile experiences that reimagine the way people connect with services that they need
• Make the things we use and the ways we get around more sustainable
• Creatively rethink technology to better connect people and ideas

Interaction designers seek solutions to complex environmental challenges—from designing smart devices to reimagining educational environments. A unique and growing field, it explores the ways people engage with technology and their environments in their daily lives.

IxD at the Corcoran educates emerging designers to shape and design new technologies in a public service-oriented framework. Emerging from new design initiatives across the school, the program is for students who are inspired by complexity and interested in exploring new interdisciplinary approaches to design solutions. It explores the connections between design innovation and community engagement, focusing on the ways that interaction designers shape digital and physical environments, services, products and systems with a particular focus on the delivery of services and the role of interaction design in public policy.

 

PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Design Process: You will be able to independently and collaboratively brainstorm and design interactive systems, objects, interfaces, services, user flows and multi-modal experiences. You will be able to develop your work through iterative prototyping.
• Innovation: You will be able to synthesize skills in research, process, user responsiveness, systems analysis and entrepreneurial energy to create innovative and effective user experiences when working alone, with collaborators or contributing to the larger group effort.
• Design Research: You will be able to independently and collaboratively undertake quantitative and qualitative user research as well as research into historical, theoretical and policy-based questions as a basis for design work. Additionally, you will be able to analyze designed systems and user flows in a variety of contexts.
• Designing for complex systemic challenges: You will develop process techniques and skills to responsibly and respectfully engage communities and their histories in the process of developing design-based responses.
• Address client, audience and user needs: You will understand and practice design as an active process of problem finding and solving that relies upon generating, developing and communicating ideas informed by and responsive to their context. You will demonstrate an understanding of your responsibility to clients, audiences and users — be able to articulate and clarify needs, structure design challenges, solve problems creatively and address conflict through the design process.
• Evaluate the impact of design solutions: You will be able to approach design solutions with a focus on potential environmental and social impacts over their lifecycle as well as their capacity to contribute to equitable outcomes.
• Professionalism: You will create persuasive presentation of work and be able to evaluate and defend design decisions and support arguments with research and case studies.
• Leadership: You will practice leadership for complex design challenges and change through effective communication, organizational understanding, design strategy and self-reflective approaches to working with and guiding the work of others.

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