Instructors' Reflections
Instructor: Yvette Shen Teaching Assistants: Borami Kang, Valeska Tan
The Polished Version
This studio was a meaningful experiment in teaching UX in an interdisciplinary setting, opening up a broader and more interesting space for learning. Bringing together students from Visual Communication Design and Experiential Media Design created opportunities to approach experience from multiple angles, while asking them to work across interface, space, behavior, and system thinking within the same project.
A central foundation of the course was the importance of keeping research active throughout the process. Students were asked to use observation, behavior, and context not just as a starting point, but as an ongoing way to question, refine, and strengthen their ideas. At the same time, visually engaging form often shaped the first impression of a project, making it important to connect strong visual expression with equally strong UX reasoning.
The course also highlighted collaboration as an ongoing skill to develop. Working across disciplines asked students to communicate clearly, navigate different strengths, and build shared projects through different ways of thinking and making.
The Candid Version
This studio asked for a lot: sophomore students working in interdisciplinary teams, moving through one semester-long project, and designing across interface, space, behavior, and system logic. Exciting, yes. Simple, no.
Scale was one challenge. Large studios bring energy, but not always clarity. Students move at different speeds, come in with different levels of preparation, and do not always read feedback the same way. Keeping expectations clear across many teams took constant recalibration.
Teamwork brought another layer of complexity. Students had different interests, expectations, and assumptions about process, so collaboration was often less about seamless synergy and more about figuring out who was doing what, how decisions were made, and how everyone stayed accountable. The studio also involved multiple instructors, so feedback sometimes came from different angles. For students looking for a clearer path forward, that added another layer of difficulty.
Research was emphasized throughout. The challenge was that students did not always arrive excited by it. Many understandably wanted to focus on making something polished and portfolio-ready. Keeping them engaged in research, and helping them see why it mattered to the design, was one of the harder parts of the studio. In UX, research is rarely the flashy part, but without it the work quickly loses direction.
And then there was the ambition of designing UX beyond screens. Working with projection, movement, space, and behavior opened up more interesting possibilities, but also made it easier for ideas to get vague or overextended. “Beyond screens” is inspiring. It also makes everything harder.
Still, much of the learning came from exactly these tensions: when ideas had to be scaled back, when assumptions had to be questioned, and when research finally had to do more than sit politely at the beginning of the process.