Stories

Within, Above and Beyond is the recent interactive multimedia piece by multimedia artist Yulia Lanina. In the piece, Lanina interacts with projected animations of her paintings in a narrative that chronicles Lanina’s journey to find clarity amid the noise of disconcerting news, images and social media.

Two graphic designers turned software designers worked together for years at Etsy, where they helped build and scale the online marketplace that connects millions of buyers and sellers from nearly every country in the world today. In this dialogue, these two designers discuss their own career journeys and what they’ve learned about creating compelling shopping experiences online.

How should educators teach game design principles? The short answer is to teach the principles of play—specifically, play as a mechanism for exploring interactive systems and a means for designing game levels. 

Associate Dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies Doreen Lorenzo introduces the 2018 issue of the Journal of Design and Creative Technologies.

Today, entrepreneurship is about more than launching a new company. It’s a way of thinking and acting that can change your world and the world of others.

From radically redesigning the syllabus, to reimagining the role of facilitators inside and outside of class, to considering student-directed learning as a human-centered design challenge, designers are leading the way in transforming the collegiate classroom.

The tools of design thinking are intellectual and conceptual, and while design thinking toolkits can be incredibly useful, they don’t guarantee “mastery” of design or design thinking. It’s a nuanced process that takes time and instruction to build design cognition, a sharp eye, and skilled hands.

Institutions of higher education are looking for new approaches to retain students, ensure timely progression and graduation, and maximize learning. University culture, structure, and incentives can often paralyze institutions, making it challenging to focus the work of faculty and administrators in a meaningful and timely way. Research conducted at Boise State University shows that design thinking has the potential to increase the creative capacity of university staff at all levels to rapidly improve the student experience.

When Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of Fidelity Investments, decided to help borrowers gain a greater sense of control over their student loans, it became apparent that it was extremely hard for borrowers to obtain a clear picture of their total debt. The Fidelity Labs team used human-centered design techniques to distill the complexity of student loans and give borrowers the agency to take control of their financial futures.

Welcome to the first edition of the Design Reader, presented by the School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.