Teaching and Learning Design: Commonalty and Diversity in Ergonomics, HCI and Architecture Design Education

For four years we have been developing a design pedagogy that merges significant aspects of our disciplines (architecture and HCI). This has culminated in a joint design course where we bridged between design-build courses in architecture and user-interaction engineering. In this paper we cover lessons learned, based on our experience. Using the pedagogy developed for the Bauhaus, we have identified five goals for design education. Primary among these is education that combines designing artifacts with building them. We report commonalties and differences between our professions that have a significant impact on design education. Our work points to three recommendations for cross-disciplinary design education. Primary among them is to focus on design studios to keep within practical and manageable bounds.