Ryan HigginsDesign Education · Long-Form Leadership
Curriculum Development
12 years building and evolving interaction design curriculum — keeping pace with a field that kept reinventing itself.
Overview
The Work
From 2011 to 2023, I built and taught interaction design curriculum at Wilmington University in New Castle, DE. I wasn't hired to maintain an existing program. I was brought in to build one.
Over twelve years, I designed three full courses from scratch, adapted them through four distinct phases as the field evolved — from skeuomorphic mobile apps to flat design to design systems to AI-assisted prototyping — and graduated hundreds of students who went on to professional design roles.
This is a case study in sustained curriculum design: the ongoing work of keeping educational content relevant, rigorous, and honest about what students actually need to succeed in an industry that doesn't stay still.
Challenge
The Problem
Interaction design education in 2011 was still catching up to practice. The tools were Photoshop and Illustrator. The web was the output medium. Mobile was a conversation, not yet a given. Teaching students "how to use software" was a trap I wanted to avoid from the start — the software would change. The thinking had to be durable.
The deeper challenge was teaching judgment in an environment that rewards craft. Fine arts students are trained to see, to make, to iterate aesthetically. Interaction design asks them to also think systemically — about users, flows, failure states, accessibility, and constraint. That's a significant cognitive expansion, and it takes time.
By 2019, a new challenge emerged: the tools had proliferated. Sketch, Figma, InVision, Zeplin, Principle, ProtoPie — students could spend an entire course learning tooling and graduate without being able to think about design independently of it. I had to make pedagogical choices about what to teach explicitly and what to leave implicit.
The tools would always change. I was trying to teach something the tools couldn't do for them.
Approach
How I Worked
I structured curriculum development as a continuous design practice — with distinct phases corresponding to how the field and the student population shifted over twelve years.
Phase 1 (2011–2015): Building the foundation
I designed the first interaction design course from a blank slate. The core pedagogical framework: start with principles (hierarchy, flow, feedback, affordance), not tools. Students learned to produce interaction design in Photoshop because that forced them to think carefully — there was no prototype mode, no auto-layout. Every decision was explicit. Projects focused on mobile apps because that was the most concrete, student-legible design surface at the time.
Phase 2 (2015–2019): Adapting to a maturing field
Design systems emerged as a dominant pattern. Flat design had replaced skeuomorphism. Component-based thinking was becoming essential. I rebuilt the intermediate course around systems design — introducing component libraries, style guides, and the relationship between visual language and behavior. I also began integrating cross-functional context: how does a design hand off to engineering? What does "done" mean in a production environment?
Phase 3 (2019–2021): Remote-first adaptation
The pandemic forced a complete rethinking of the studio model. Critique, the backbone of design education, doesn't translate to Zoom automatically. I redesigned the course rhythm around asynchronous critique structures — recorded walkthroughs, written annotations, structured peer review frameworks — that preserved the depth of feedback without requiring synchronous presence. Several of these structures proved more effective than live critique and I kept them post-pandemic.
Phase 4 (2021–2023): AI and the new prototype standard
By 2021, students were producing higher-fidelity work faster than ever before. AI tools and no-code prototyping raised the bar on what "a prototype" meant in a portfolio. I designed a new advanced course — CSC 370 — built around this reality: students work with real data, ship working experiments, and produce case studies that demonstrate outcome-based thinking, not artifact production. This was the most significant curriculum overhaul and the most directly connected to the work I do professionally.
Solution
What We Built
Three courses, each designed for a specific level of development — foundational principles, systems design, and advanced AI-native prototyping — with a pedagogical framework that emphasized transferable judgment over tool proficiency.
Interaction Design I: Principles over tools
An introductory course built around the durable concepts of interaction design: affordance, feedback, flow, hierarchy, and mental models. Projects were platform-agnostic before going platform-specific. Assessment was structured around design rationale — can you explain why you made each decision? — rather than visual finish alone.
Interaction Design II: Systems and handoff
An intermediate course focused on component-based design systems, design-engineering collaboration, and the transition from concept to production. Students built and documented full design systems for a real product scope, and presented to a cross-disciplinary jury that included engineers and product professionals — giving them experience presenting to non-designers.
CSC 370: Advanced Interaction Design
The advanced course I built in 2021–23 for students who had mastered the fundamentals and needed to learn how professionals work today: with AI tools, real data, working prototypes, and outcome-driven case studies. The capstone project required students to define a problem, conduct research, build a working prototype with real or simulated data, and document a complete case study suitable for a professional portfolio.
Cross-program critique framework
I developed a structured critique framework used across all three courses and eventually adopted by adjacent programs. The framework gave students explicit roles (presenter, questioner, synthesizer), time constraints, and a written output requirement. Critique became a skill taught explicitly rather than absorbed implicitly — and student work improved measurably as a result.
Results
What Changed
Graduates have gone on to design roles at some of the largest technology and FinTech companies in the world, built successful products as solo entrepreneurs, and launched their own studios. Several now teach interaction design themselves.
The pedagogical frameworks I developed — particularly around critique structure and outcome-based case studies — were adopted by the broader design department and referenced in curriculum reviews as models for other courses.
The advanced course I built in 2021 was the first at Wilmington to explicitly incorporate AI-assisted prototyping as a core competency. Students who went through it arrived at their first jobs already comfortable with a workflow that most working designers were still figuring out.
Reflection
What I Learned
Teach the thinking, not the tool
Every major tool in my curriculum has been deprecated or replaced at least once. The students who succeeded long-term were the ones who could articulate why they made design decisions — not just demonstrate that they knew how to use Sketch or Figma. Durability comes from judgment, not proficiency.
Assessment design is as important as content design
How you evaluate work shapes what students practice. When I moved from portfolio grades to rationale-based assessment — requiring students to document decision-making, not just show outcomes — the quality of thinking in critiques improved within a single semester. Assessment is curriculum.
The field evolves faster than syllabi do by default
If you teach the same course for twelve years without rebuilding it, you're teaching 2011 design in 2023. I rebuilt or significantly revised every course at least twice. The work of curriculum development is never finished — it tracks the field, and the field moves.
Cross-disciplinary juries produce better designers
Inviting engineers, product managers, and researchers to critique student work changed what students practiced. They stopped optimizing for aesthetic approval and started designing for comprehensibility to a mixed audience — which is what professional design actually requires.
Constraints produce clarity
Some of the best student work came from the most constrained briefs. A well-designed constraint — design for one user, one task, one screen — focuses attention and forces precision. Unconstrained briefs produce wandering work. This applies to professional practice as much as education.
Teaching is a design practice
Building a curriculum is not categorically different from building a product: you're defining a goal, understanding your users, designing an experience, testing it, and iterating. The feedback loops in education are longer, but the underlying practice is the same. Teaching made me a better designer. I believe this sincerely.