Educating Interaction, Experience and Diversity

When we look at the developments within design over the last years, two major buzzwords emerge: interaction and experience. At the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering we try to anticipate and respond to these directions in design tuning our assignments towards experience and interaction and by developing new design tools, techniques and even a new structure for our design courses. These tools, techniques and courses do not only aim at supporting and enhancing interaction and experience, they also aim at diversity. Because experiences are highly personal, we believe that diversity is one of the key-issues to be addressed [1]. The new structure, called the Boulevard of Inspiration, trains design students to take advantage of and expand their personal competencies, capitalise on their drive and passion and explore an abundant number of tools and techniques especially through the first phases of the design process in order to gain a rich variety of products, which fit the diversity of users. In this paper we will show a few of our achievements and discuss that designing for interaction and experience using the Boulevard of Inspiration and design techniques such as Tinkering and IA-Cards, seems a tempting, rewarding and feasible concept for contemporary design education.