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Preserving
the Craft
of Thinking
Jodi Leo & Erica Heinz
IxDA Summit 2018

Introduction
In our practices and in our five-plus years teaching at Parsons, SVA, and RISD,
we’ve witnessed first-hand the demand placed on teachers and students to
generate portfolio pieces.
While we understand that portfolios are the calling card to employment, we
worry that lack of time to explore, digest, incubate, and think is detrimental to
future and current designers.
We’re here to share some of our exploration around a portfolio-obsessed culture
and are very interested in talking with you about yours.

Goals of today’s discussion
We want to spend the bulk of our time today hearing from this amazing confluence
of smart people.
● 10 minutes: introduce yourself and share what you hope to learn today
● 20 minutes: share our research and hypotheses
● 60 minutes: 15 minutes on each of four questions.

Discussion attendees and affiliations
● Marti, Carnegie Mellon HCI Institute, Director of the Learning Media Design Center and Assistant
Dean, Integrative Design, Arts, & Technology
● Dianna, Syracuse University, Assistant Professor at the Industrial & Interaction Design program
● Harry, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Director of the Communication & Multimedia
Design program
● Marie, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Educator
● Nina, University College of Southeast Norway, Lecturer
● Andrew, Goucher College, Academic Director of the MFA in Digital Arts
● Jinjae, Hyper Island Stockholm, Student
● Michael, Kennesaw State University, Associate Professor and Academic Coordinator at the
Department of Technical Communication & Interactive Design
● Erika, École normale supérieure de Lyon, Student
● Marie, École normale supérieure de Lyon, Student

Attendee interests
● Marti, “What is reflective practice, what is critical thinking when it comes to design?”
● Dianna, “How do we help students communicate thinking effectively in portfolios?”
● Harry, “How can the university and business worlds work well together?”
● Marie, “Job descriptions are focused on graphical competency and don’t put users at the core.”
● Nina, “How do we present and show the practice of thinking?”
● Andrew, “Teaching both sets of students – those interested in ideas, those interested in skills.”
● Jinjae, “I got a job without making a portfolio and want to share what I’ve learned.”
● Michael, “Not sure, just curious.”
● Erika, “I want to learn more about the craft of thinking and how to keep it balanced in my courses.”
● Marie, “I’m curious.”

Methods
Between December 2017 and February 2018, we surveyed and interviewed 40 creative
hiring managers, educators, and students of interaction design from SVA IxD, RISD Graphic
and Industrial Design, Parsons Communications Design and Design & Technology, Apple,
Facebook, Nike, Etsy, Isobar, IBM, Rokkan, and more.
Our surveys and interviews asked participants to define and share points of view about:
● Foundational skills
● In-demand skills
● Conceptual thinking skills
● Their experiences with portfolios and the hiring process
A summary of what we learned follows.

Summary
Foundational skills: those which every IxD should learn in year one
● Hiring managers want students to stay up on adjacent fields but pick something
they love and ace it.
● Students can’t possibly master the litany of the foundational skills they list
● Educators reported a tactical list of foundational skills, like “iterative design”
Overall skills: the coalescing of IxD skills with other design capabilities
● Students reported the need to be prepared for conceptual challenges in the
workplace. Educators feel they are covering that topic sufficiently. However,
● Hiring managers want more deep thinking and real-world execution

Summary continued
In-demand skills: what do the job descriptions tell us?
● Hiring managers want new designers to generate a variety of ideas and they expect
recent graduates to have command of some technical skills and “unteachable” skills.
● Educators wrap IxD job descriptions into the term “tech skills”
● Students have a laundry list and less idea how to focus
Conceptual skills: ideas and moving ideas forward
● HMs value curiosity and awareness of non-design goals plus how to measure them
● HMs want new designers to be self-aware about conditions they need to perform well
● Students and educators called out holistic thinking as a core IxD skill because it makes
for well-considered and optimal design

Discussion:
Honing in on the conceptual skills of interaction designers
Some of the skills interaction designers bring to the table:
● Representing frameworks
● How to take eclectic knowledge you’ve gained and translate it into products,
services, experiences
● The ability to see the big picture and the system and represent that in a way so
a group can collaborate and think together then communicate
● Thinking ethically about the solutions they’re designing for
You have to have this rich, deep ability to go out into the world and understand it in a
nuanced way and that may not be coming solely through our design education.”
Marti Louw“

A range for discussion
For the sake of this discussion, we’re putting “conceptual” and “portfolio” priorities
at two ends of a spectrum.

When we say “conceptual...”
We’re talking about abstract or non-visual creative activities such as exploration,
‘ripping the brief,’ redefining, breaking information down, synthesizing, immersing,
interpreting, integrating.
These skills are harder to demonstrate, but our research emphasized how essential
they are in the long term.
Do you agree?
If there's no stable idea to move a project forward, it doesn't move forward. It all starts
with conceptual skills… In order to get promoted, a young designer has to prove that
they have moved from aesthetics to be able to fulfill more conceptual requirements.”
K.D., hiring manager
at MICA and
educator at RISD
“

Discussion:
Conceptual thinking should be refined, not introduced in design school
Interaction design is often thought about as a discipline without any criticality. What
does this conceptual thing mean? You’re talking about the skills of a Liberal Arts
education… A rich, deep ability to go out into the world and understand it in a nuanced
way may not be coming through our design education.”
Marti Louw
Increasingly, critical thinking is not even a factor in higher education. There’s not a lot
we can do at 20 if a student has not been developing critical thinking throughout
secondary education. Also, there are different sort of native thinking styles and many
students who come to a design program are sensate – very focused on the object, the
sensorial and may not be conceptually oriented.”
Dianna Miller
“
“

When we say “portfolio…”
We’re talking about the pressure to make marketable visual artifacts clearly
demonstrative of common IxD job requirements or replicable processes.
These practical or tactical skills often get students their first opportunities, but can eat up
the time for deeper thinking and the development of a strong individual voice.
Do you agree?
It's expensive to go here and it’s sold on the promise that you come out of here and
you have a job. You get a job by having a portfolio and if you don’t have a portfolio,
you don’t get a job.”
M., MFA at RISD“

Discussion:
Much time is spent on portfolios because they’re overwhelming. Break it down!
There are many, many layers to getting a job and it’s not just dependent upon the
portfolio. In some ways, portfolios are just a simple sorting and sifting tool to see why
employers should pay attention to you. Initially it’s about just trying to get an employer
interested to get in there and have a conversation with you.
It’s also about crafting the right message and the right medium for the right use.
The portfolio – instead of being a big spread with all of your work in it – it’s your
laptop and you click around and show your work and talk about it.
What I’m really interested in is your organizational skills, how you tell the story of the
work that’s in there. It goes back to your process and being able, in conversation, to
bring up something you did in your work.
Deeper again than the portfolio and telling the story of yourself, you're not just doing it
through a website, you’re doing it through a narrative reveal of your work.”
Marti Louw“

Discussion:
Speaking of breaking it down, here is a useful primer on how to create a portfolio
At my university, we’ve spent time understanding, ‘what is the role of the portfolio,
what can it be used for?’ We landed on the words ‘professional identity.’ What is
your identity as a professional, your identity as a designer?
Start with describing your identity: who are you. Then, why are you an interaction
designer? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to reach with your
identity, your skills?
And then process – how you practice: how can you give that form? How do you
identify in your work where this happens? What questions did you ask? What
questions were important for you to answer, what decisions did you make, and why
did you make those decisions?”
Harry Zengerink“

Hiring managers differ on essentials
90% of educators
interviewed said that
conceptual thinking
was a key overall skill
Most reported
executional chops
and some amount of
professional polish
⅔ of students reported
holistic thinking
as essential
⅓ reported single
capabilities –��such as
user research and
sketching – as essential
Hiring managers Educators Students

When hiring managers say “chops”
New designers must know these, “or need to be rescued in the heat of a deadline.”
If they know the programs but can't create communicative designs, that's no good.” S.S., Design
Director at Nike
“
● UX: how to design for a goal, and how to measure success on that goal
● Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator
● Computer science / ability prototype ideas
● Design, typography, color theory

Preparing students for professional work
Conceptual skills presented well
Prototype in code and more experience with REAL user research
Digital products exist in ecosystem, digital is more complex than print
Educators said:Hiring Managers said: Students said:
Professional best practices and interpersonal skills within teams
What experience is missing?
J.C., Educator,
Chair at Parsons
“Students are incredibly job-focused without knowing what jobs are.”

Preparing portfolios
Teachers consciously make a point to give students portfolio pieces and it often feels
like a compromise. They say, ‘We’re going to do 2 projects this semester:
this is your portfolio project but first we're going to do this one, which is the work I
believe we should focus on.’ The portfolio project sometimes feels well considered,
but most of the times it feels like the teacher is throwing a bone to the students who
are asking for it.”
M., MFA student at
RISD
“

Hiring managers see gaps in portfolios
● They want to see deep thinking
○ “a problem thought through from top to bottom, even if the answer is wrong. I'd
rather see the thinking than just a shiny, disconnected final answer.”
○ “more critical thinking – how they approached the challenge, how they found
solutions, how that was communicated, how they collaborated with the full team”
○ “a diverse portfolio that delves deeply into the process and tells a compelling story
of how they arrived at their designs”
● They want to see real-world execution
○ “believable examples of products that have been user tested”
○ “mobile app flows and beautiful app screens”
○ “ability to present a brand language through simple and sophisticated UI.”

In the end, who do they take a risk on?
Most hiring managers had not hired a strong thinker with
very rudimentary technical skills
Half of hiring managers had hired a candidate who had a
beautiful portfolio but could not deliver on the conceptual
challenges on the job.
On the spectrum from strong thinkers to strong makers
All designers, writers, producers must have deep technical expertise.” F.M., Design Manager
at Facebook
“
Yes. I think they worked on a team and took credit for more work than they
actually did. Quickly became toxic.”
C.V., Creative Director
at Isobar
“

Who’s trying to help students succeed?
Students are trying to make a successful connection with the right hiring manager
and all parties want them to get there.
Educators are the most visible and accessible bridge, but our research revealed
many other actors in the system and many other ways the game could be arranged.
Motivation and return-on-investment bubbled up in our research with students. It
led us to look at the cast of characters who driving actions, reactions and
connections to set the scene for a more fruitful set of interactions.

Students
Hiring
Managers
Parents
Educators
Career
Services
School
Marketing
Alumni
Department
Chairs

Motivations
As the student tries to make the connection with hiring managers, they must
navigate a complicated social space of conflicting motivations
● Parents are often helicopters, wanting ROI in some form
● School marketing promises this ROI, but has little contact with faculty
● Department chairs have their own biases, and dealings with academic politics
● Alumni are often the best connection to jobs, but have less motivation
● Career services want to satisfy employers, but don’t always know how to
communicate with students and faculty
Are there any other actors?

Discussion:
ROI oversimplifies. Parents care deeply and some have networking potential
Developmentally we want students to separate from parents at this milestone. Do
parents stand in the outside perimeter of community? There's a lot of knowledge and
networking potential that parents can get engaged in and they care deeply about it
their kids and the community at large.”
Marti Louw“
My parents offer to introduce me to people in their LinkedIn network because I’m
paralyzed about randomly emailing companies. I’m thinking about taking them up on it
but they don’t know people in my areas of interest. They’re doing it out of panic and
that’s embarrassing.”
A., MFA at SVA“

Onward and upward
We’re trying to help students across this jungle, and get them safely in the door at
their first job, but we also want them to succeed down the road. Tactical skills might
get them the position as a production designer, but conceptual skills are required
to move upward into strategic ranks.
That first step is the focus for today —��we know students need to build a portfolio
of core foundational skills, but can we also make time for the conceptual thinking
skills that build a career?

New Designer
Interaction Designer
Practical/Tactical Skills
Conceptual Skills
Senior Interaction Designer
Associate Director
Director
Group Director
Executive Director
A typical agency career path.

How do you allocate
time for technical vs
conceptual skills?

Students are most proud of projects with:
● Satisfied users (direct feedback through user testing or metrics)
● Personal voice (demonstration and control of a self-driven process)
● Unique ideas (strategic or artistic innovation)
● Replicable methods (valuable investigations and practices)
● Satisfying polish (professional, tangible, or finished feelings)
● Effective collaboration (positive and/or cross-disciplinary teams)
Our research showed that

Discussion:
Some educators are sneaking in conceptual units to ensure balance
I decided to make some of the more deliverables-heavy classes electives rather than
requirements to force students to take some of the more conceptually-based classes.”
Michael Lahey
Every class is on the spectrum of technical and conceptual – I advocate for a mix in
every class.”
Andrew Bernstein
To help people on-ramp onto the class, we created micros and minis. They’re 1-credit
or 6-unit weekend courses, and that way we can get them developing or machining.
If we’re trying to get to the conceptual stuff and the higher-level thinking, we don’t
want to take class time doing that stuff. We don't want to take everyone through a
rudimentary unit.”
Marti Louw
“
“
“

Discussion:
Interdisciplinary students want to integrate technology holistically into their fields
Students from departments like drama and computer science come to our department
and want to be what we call full-stack prototypers.
They want to go from problem-finding to richly exploring a space, understanding an
interesting problem to work on, all the way through to realizing interesting ways to
conceptualize the probes and prototypes and to be able to build those things in a
realizable way. Enough to put them out into the world and get interesting feedback
to move a concept along.
They’re all trying to get these – I’d say – prototyping skills because they’re thinking in
multimedia, multimodal ways.
That way if you go into any of these industries you could be using technology and
be creative about integrating technology into that place.”
Marti Louw“

What skills for IxD
can’t be learned
on the job?

On-the-ground versus “unteachable” skills
New designers learn these in context: Unteachable skills designers must bring:
Comparing what hiring managers teach on-the-job versus the unteachable
Design is part of an interdisciplinary effort.
Know what your collaborators need
They need to be asked hard questions about their work. It has less to do with pure
composition, more about its efficacy.”
P.M., Design
Manager at Apple
“
Product approach: sprint planning
Presentation skills to a business audience with
different goals and capabilities
Careful documentation and keeping track of what
you’ve done and need to do next
Maker attitude
Natural eye, developed design taste
Curiosity, humility and a spark
Pays attention to detail, responds well to critique

Students need more info to feel confident
What I’m interested in is where do the professional skills come in? Where do you
learn to prep a file for print at the printing press, mark something up for an engineer to
prototype? When is it too early and when is it too late? Maybe it's something that has
to happen in the summer. It's a 2 year program, but maybe it's something you learn
in between.”
M., MFA student at
RISD
“
I have no idea how to do this interview and I’ve been to the career center 5 times.
Maybe it’s just me. I have learned here that I have to go in over-prepared to big
critiques. I can’t believe how underprepared I feel. The internship job description
barely mentions skills and I’d like to be able to speak very clearly to the skills I have
and even don’t have. I can’t think of what questions to ask the interviewer and I think
that’s because I don’t feel confident. It’s Apple!
X., junior at RISD“

Foundational skills
● Hiring managers believe foundations develop upcoming design professionals into
T-shaped generalist with one skill they’re amazing at such as visual design,
interaction design, even computer science. The message is stay up on adjacent fields
but pick something
● User experience design is foundational according to hiring managers. That includes
understanding users, user flows, design and hierarchy, solves problems by making
stimuli and talking to real people about them, writing, storyboarding/diagramming.
● Students are overwhelmed: When polled, students shared laundry lists of disparate
skills that hint at the fact that they’re bloody overwhelmed.
● Educators shared a tactical set of IxD foundational skills, and added professional
skills, plus attention to excellence with a higher level of craft/polish/taste
Essential building blocks for a career in this field

Discussion:
Industry will fail at teaching ethics. Design education should develop this reasoning
How are we teaching people how to think about designing with big data or machine
learning? Not just thinking about getting a tool out to market or usability, but the larger
set of implications of what happens when you commodify choice or reputation.
What is the student driving towards?
How are we preparing our students to think deeply about the implications of the
social and social technology they’re creating and the ramifications and the
second-order impacts?
A design education – that’s not conceptual skills, it's a broader set of things we're
needing our students to come together and reason with each other. That to me is
what university education is trying to put out.
It’s very dangerous to continue educating people in a very
‘1-year-program-to-go-out-and-make-wicked-tools’.”
Marti Louw“

How can we protect
and propagate
conceptual methods?

Top conceptual skills across categories
Understanding that “design is
a thought process not a thing
you do... You don't design at a
problem, you use design skills
and processes to uncover,
explore, and iterate on a
problem”
Resilience, comfort with new
situations
Understanding humans
Rigor – obsessively moving
forward with a curious mind to
make things happen
Understand how to design for
a goal, and how to measure
success on that goal
Self-awareness – have a
point of view on the
conditions they need to
perform their best
Holistic and systems thinking
so interaction models are well
considered; understanding
your design fits in an ecosystem
The ability to turn user
observations into insights
and better design
Highly creative problem solving
Relentless curiosity

Valuable conceptual exercises
● Inspiration: Showing the work of Sol Lewitt —AB
● Framework: Using the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond diagram/process
as a timeline to encourage patience through the more abstract parts of the
process —EH
● Aesthetic preferences:
What else?
For a class focused on form, students collect 200+ pieces of visual inspiration. When
they come to class, they are asked to divide those images into form and material and
they can duplicate images in both areas. Then they categorize those 200 thumbnails
into different buckets and name them. The aim is to understand their own artistic
preferences with form and materials, and then they make work based on those
aesthetic and material divisions.”
K.D., hiring manager
at MICA and
educator at RISD
“

How can schools
help students
master changing
portfolio skills?

In-demand / listed on job descriptions
Wireframing, rapid prototyping
using Adobe XD or InVision
Digital is not print (many more
states and conditions to a
screen than a poster)
Tech skills we teach in
electives (E.g. UX, light coding)
Sketches a variety of interface
ideas and flows across devices
Employs generative thinking
in which many approaches
are imagined
Knowledge of information
architecture, systems thinking,
and content strategy.
Buzzwords: UX/UI, VR, AR
A sample litany: “I need to
know Adobe Creative Suite,
literacy in common languages
like HTML5, CSS, JS,
prototyping and iterating
designs and sketches (e.g.
with Sketch and InVision),
understanding user behavior
through researching and
interviewing. Also empathy.”

Discussion:
Without documentation, there is nothing to draw upon to make sense of your work
Documentation as a repeated learning practice should be baked into the curriculum or
course experience so when it comes time to make portfolios, students have a rich
stock of materials available to them.
If they’ve been practicing talking about their work based on archived selections, talking
about their process and projects isn’t a stretch because they've been practicing it
throughout. We’re looking at learning practices that include stopping and looking,
noticing, reflecting, articulating your ideas and what you’re doing, then critiquing
In architecture design studios it’s kind of in the water so you don’t have to force people
to do it as much – they know there's a payoff to it. There, students do it through
assignments, moments built into the space of the classroom.
We are already building these moments into our interaction design classrooms, but
when it comes to documentation, we should try being specific about it, building value
and practice around it.”
Marti Louw“

Discussion:
Trends may change – our human experiences should be part of the portfolio
Part of what we can teach is confidence to expose your deep thinking. Your
perspective reveals itself in the design and is not to be hidden away from the client
or hiring managers. You should show the story of you as a confident move. After all,
we’re using our experiences all the time in this field.”
Nina Lysbakken“

FIN. Merci!
Erica & Jodi,
Lyon, France

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Preserving the Craft of Thinking

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