Why Interaction Designers need to Teach, and vice versa.

There are two main ways of understanding complex ideas. One is to have someone or something else interface between you and the complexities, and abstract them so you don’t have to think about it. The other is to be taught. (But really if you think about it, they’re the same thing)

One of the great things about design today is the community that surrounds it. They give it meaning, and purposeful design is something all designers strive for. Because, it helps people.

Let’s consider the reason why we have nursing homes. Why do we have people who specialize in nursing and care? We know that, like teaching, these careers aren’t necessarily the most monetarily fruitful, but there is a passion behind each individual who finds themselves in that practice. I’m not saying every one is like this, but for the most part, you have to believe in what you do. On the other hand, there are older individuals who need daily attention and care, but they have no children, or their children are too busy to care for them in that way. Having seen the inside perspective of nursing homes from my mother’s social work, the most unfortunate case are those individuals who have immigrated and have lost complete touch with any of their family, leaving them with no sense of belonging, and the feeling that they lack individuality, or purpose.

The design of those nursing homes with the best care comes down to the community structure of those who work in it. Who cares for those who need it? Who helps Mary with her broken stroller leg? Who communicates with who in an emergency, and who puts together the social events to create a stronger sense of community for those who seek it?

To truly understand and embody these principles of empathy however, we as designers need to interface with those looking for solutions to their problems. I once had an older gentleman ask me to take a look at his computer, because he was having problems accessing certain applications and the computer was running slow. Just to give you an idea, he was using an older desktop computer running an outdated version of Windows XP, and the icons on the desktop were arranged in a loose heart shape, because he loves hearts.

I dove right in to the deeper maintenance tools, ran optimization tests, deleted bloatware from the 90’s, and explained to him that there’s only so much you can do when you’re running high-process demanding web applications like youtube and other web-streaming technologies on a computer designed for excel and DOOM.

I was younger then, but I could still tell that he wasn’t actually interested in learning everything about the computer, in fact, he had his college-attending-daughter come over with us to learn from a 19 year old, how to delete applications. My mother said to me later something that really stuck with me–what he probably really valued, besides all the technical reasons, was companionship. Thinking back now, I think that was really true. I remember that every time I came over he was happy to talk on and on about anything, and he was always finding reason to make his visitors coffee or tea.

To teach people is really to learn about their motivations. People will listen to how you talk about things, see your passion, and ultimately if they see the applicability of the skill, they will apply it to their own lives and aim to reach your level of motivation. I know that in high-school, I probably would have stuck with mathematics and physics if my teachers weren’t so burnt out and overworked. They had the passion about these topics deep down but were overburdened by their responsibilities. Well, we can definitely decide to design these school systems better so that we allow teachers to interface with the students better, worry less about administrative elements, of course–compensate them better, and allow their passions to shine through.

In closing, I also want to make the point that learning, and learning to learn is just as important to all of this as well, but as interaction designers, we are educators. There’s such a direct parallel that we cannot avoid it, and both fields could benefit from concepts from each. The best way to bridge those gaps, of course, is to embody and act upon each.