Center Centre — first course complete
As the first cohort of students (6 strong) we’ve decided to create a blog and take turns writing about our experience. Here goes.
First you should know what Center Centre is. Center Centre is the school founded by Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman and Jared Spool to solve the problems that companies have when hiring new Junior User Experience (UX) designers. You can read all about how it came to be here: http://centercentre.com/about. While you’re there browse and learn some more about Center Centre.
Being a student at Center Centre is just what they describe on their website. We have two day workshops by industry professionals, we create a personal plans to learn about each topic and how we’ll demonstrate that knowledge, then we work on real world projects.
The environment is a friendly, learning focused, work environment. We show up all day, every day. For a week we focus on learning then for two weeks we focus on doing. The doing comes on a project that will last (in this case) for 6 courses. As we work on the project we pause and discuss how what we learned applies to what we’re doing.
We work as a team. We collaborate, discuss, and work towards solutions together. We have stand-ups to start the day and reflection to conclude it. There are paper prototypes, sticky notes — lots of sticky notes, white boards, and sketches.
We focus on learning. We’re able to pause our tasks and talk about the theory behind what we’re doing. We take turns doing everything so that we all get the chance to practice.
The communication is open and frequent so we don’t ever get too far off course or become focused on the wrong task or learning the wrong thing.
The culture is deliberately built. We learn about it and focus on it.
Each course is a particular UX skill, each skill is broken down into competencies, each competency has levels from beginner to distinguished. We’re given the information up front and discuss it before each course. We know what is expected of us and why what we learn and do is valuable to our future employers.
Our first course was an introduction into UX design. We learned about iterations, journey maps, knowledge gaps, the elements of UX design, design principles, research and prototypes.
After the week of learning came two weeks of project work. We went through a design sprint, covered the walls in sticky notes, covered the boards in notes, and discussed what will be the best solution to the problem we’re dealing with.
We’ll put the project on hold for a week while we get into the second course then come back to it armed with more knowledge.
This is a small taste of what it’s like as a student at Center Centre. Every day I go to school confident that what I’m learning will be interesting, challenging, and applicable.
