Iterative Writing and Curiosity Learning in Interaction Design Education

Conference poster, 2026

Iterative writing can play an active role in design learning by helping students articulate observations, justify decisions, and reflect on their work while the design process is unfolding. Rather than functioning solely as a final deliverable, writing can become a tool for reflection, sense-making, and design knowledge formation throughout a project.

This project presents a three-year pedagogical redesign of a master's-level interaction design course in which a traditional final report was replaced by three shorter reports integrated into the main phases of the design process: exploration, prototyping and evaluation, and design iteration. The model encourages students to engage in continuous reflection and connect writing directly to ongoing design work.

Iterative writing transforms writing from a reporting activity into a core design practice. It supports exploration, development, and improvement while strengthening reflection, self-assessment, and reflective judgement. Writing becomes part of design knowledge formation rather than post-hoc documentation.

Over three years, the redesigned course showed positive outcomes, including improved course evaluations, a more balanced workload, and stronger opportunities for reflection. The most recent course evaluation reached 4.5 out of 5, one of the highest ratings in the programme. The project highlights how structured writing, curiosity-driven learning, and iterative practice can reinforce one another to support deep learning in design education.