Author:

Keywords:

web design education, teaching transversal competences, social design

Abstract:

Real innovation wells where creativity and technology meet. In European web and mobile design education however, the reality is that there is often quite a gap between these two capacitors. The main reason for this situation is that in the early days Technical Universities in charge of web design courses entrusted this task to the departments that seemed most suitable, such as Computer Science and Electronical Engineering. The same is also true for Communication Faculties and Design and Art Institutions. Nowadays, we realize that web and mobile design requires a much more crossdisciplinary approach and needs to be taught by teams including interaction designers, web developers, communication experts and usability specialists. “Mind the Gap” is an international two week programme aiming to mend this gap by bringing together students and teaching staff from creative, technological and communication departments during an intensive interdisciplinary web design course. Web design students usually get to design solutions for real world problems, design challenges they will be facing in their professional lives, too. During this intensive programme, however, the design challenges focus on social issues and are intentionally kept as open as possible. For instance, a possible assignment could be “build an application which helps to combat poverty in Europe”. An open challenge like this one without obvious solutions demands more cross-disciplinary creativity and communication of ideas from the students, and teaching and training these transversal skills is exactly what we are aiming at in this course. This paper sets out the objectives, structure and learning outcomes of “Mind the Gap”, describes the lessons learnt from organising three yearly editions of the course, and shortly introduces new ideas for adding an entrepreneurship element to the social design component of the course.