HCID: Who is an interaction designer?

The development of technology with all its ubiquity and pervasiveness provides new opportunities and new challenges for the interaction design practitioners, both those coming from the design tradition and computer science tradition. An increased level of problem solving and creative thinking is needed when designing for interactions with new technology. In order to develop the skills and methods for dealing with increased complexity and connectedness of technology, human computer interaction design (HCID) education needs to embrace to a larger extent design practices and design thinking. This paper aims to answer two main questions: 1) why is it necessary to teach HCID students design thinking skills and 2) how to actually implement the changes in HCID curriculum. The second question is answered based on our experience and the solution we adopted. Subsequently, we discuss the success of our approach. Pages 1924-1937, Vol 4, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers 14-17 May 2013, Oslo, Norway. Copyright © 2013 The authors.