We had some interesting visitors recently, Salu Ylirisku and Jussi Mikkonen from the School of Design at The University of Art and Design in Finland. Salu and Jussi are currently building a new curriculum on Interaction Design and are planning on employing the Arduino platform in the education. I’m currently teaching a course here at MCI called User Experience Design with a similar emphasis on prototyping. It was nice to share experiences and ideas.
I was especially interested to hear about Salu and Jussi’s recent trip to visit the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Tom Igoe teaches a really interesting sounding physical computing course there. Salu and Jussi had lots of inspiring pictures and stories about the workspace and culture. I was especially impressed with what seemed like a very collaborative, performative approach to teaching programming and the use of tools such as wikis to collect, share and improve code snippets.