Emerging Technology
This fall I’m teaching a new class (to me) in the IXD Interaction Design program at KU: Design for Emerging Technologies. I’m pretty excited about it, and we’re a few weeks in.
This was a new class last year in the program, so it’s only been taught once. And as usual I have an alarming amount of carte blanche to plan my own syllabus.
(Can one have degrees of carte blanche? Seems like perhaps it’s a binary term. You don’t get a percentage of a blank check. Let’s say I have carte blanche, and it’s a bit alarming.)
But really I’m excited! Given that so much of the frontier in design right now is working with our LLM/AI/robot friends, I’m going to have them start off with getting familiar with tools: markdown files, CLIs, handling a git repository. This will be a challenge at first for many students, because the program is not very technical. Most have never looked at their Terminal, and I joke that they are scared by monospace fonts. But I think it’ll pay dividends in their real careers, besides unlocking a lot of capability just for this class.
This week we’re going to kick off a project using ToughDesigner, which I picked because:
- it’s new to all of them
- it’s new to me
- it’s an intimidating piece of software, even though it’s got a visual interface
- it’s got MCPs so we can have claude drive it
- and mostly you can make very impressive things with it
The goal will be to get up to speed quickly so you can understand what the tech can do, and THEN apply your design toolkit to it.
If all goes well, they should feel empowered that they can approach a totally foreign tool and fumble their way towards designing something interesting.
And it will also give me a chance to channel my inner Richard Branham and shout “DESIGN is DESIGN is DESIGN is DESIGN.”
