As a student, what do you do when the organization you want to join doesn’t exist? One option is to join the closest thing you can find; the other is to start a new club yourself.
Madeline Meyer x’25 chose the latter this summer when she founded Design Interactive, a new student org kicking off in the fall 2024 semester.
The mission of Design Interactive, Meyer said, is to offer “accessible education at the intersection of design and technology.” Advised by iSchool Assistant Professor Corey Jackson and Teaching Faculty David McHugh, Design Interactive will host student-led workshops and guest speakers, enable collaborative hands-on projects, and offer curated resources for UW–Madison students interested in using leading-edge technology to bring innovative product designs to life.
The org will be based in the Information School but open to students from around the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) as well as the broader UW-Madison community. “I envision all types of students from across campus joining, whether they are in CDIS, the College of Engineering, or the School of Human Ecology,” Meyer said.
The inspiration
Meyer, an Information Science (iSci) major with certificates in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, was inspired to make design education more accessible at UW–Madison by her own experiences. First, in the course LIS 470, Interaction Design Studio, Meyer met several peers, many of them Computer Sciences majors, who expressed an interest in diving deeper into topics like user experience (UX) design. They wanted to learn more about how to put people at the center of the digital design process, but were hard-pressed to find more advanced courses in that realm.
Then, as Meyer searched for electives to round out her Information Science (iSci) major, she struggled to find courses outside the iSchool that explored the overlap between design and technology. She came away with the impression that an education in the fundamentals of product design needed to be more accessible to more students at UW–Madison, especially given the rising popularity of the topic in the age of generative artificial intelligence.
Finally, because she hopes to pursue a graduate degree after completing the iSci program, Meyer also noticed that new master’s programs in this area were cropping up at several universities, including UW–Madison’s interdisciplinary MS in Design + Innovation. “When I was exploring graduate programs, I found that most of them in this field were no more than a few years old,” she said. She saw this as an indication that interdisciplinary design was an up-and-coming field, increasingly drawing student interest.
All of these factors together led Meyer to take a bold, entrepreneurial step: founding a new student organization.
What to expect from Design Interactive
Design Interactive was founded with three key goals: to reduce student barriers to design education, to develop more interdisciplinary designers, and to spur an increase in UW–Madison course offerings at the intersection of design and technology, in part by illustrating growing student demand.
Meyer laid out what she called the “four pillars” of Design Interactive, which will help the org move toward its goals:
- Student-led workshops: Meyer described these as “low stakes and intro-friendly,” potentially covering a wide range of relevant topics, such as the history of design or emerging design technologies.
- Hands-on projects: These team projects will last throughout the semester, and may include the design of digital or physical products. Through these projects, Meyer hopes to foster “an open space for repeated practice of the design process, enhancement of collaborative skills within cross-disciplinary teams, and practice using tools for prototyping.” At the end of each semester, Meyer envisions that groups will present their final projects at a celebratory dinner.
- Guest speakers: Drawing on a wealth of expertise from the UW–Madison community and beyond, Design Interactive will welcome guest speakers to present real-world examples of how product design can improve people’s lives. Meyer noted that Jackson and McHugh’s expertise and connections will help the org secure compelling presenters.
- Curated resources: Design Interactive will promote inclusion in the design community by “maintaining and compiling resources, like articles & tutorials, a list of some UW–Madison design and innovation course offerings,” Meyer explained, in addition to an updated list of design-related work opportunities that may be of interest to students.
All four pillars will contribute to a more accessible design education, filling knowledge and skill gaps for students from an array of disciplines.
“Engineering students might come in with more technical skills, but they might want to develop more design thinking, while someone from Design Studies might want to develop more of a technical skill set,” Meyer said.
“I want it to be a kind of push and pull, where students can bring their own strengths to the group while also exploring new topics and figuring out what most interests them.”
Madeline Meyer
A space for makers
As a first step toward empowering students to create impactful semester-long projects, Design Interactive is working with the UW Makerspace, part of the Design Innovation Labs based in the College of Engineering. The Makerspace has agreed to waive three memberships for Design Interactive students during the fall semester. (Normally, the Makerspace limits access to Engineering students.) This will allow Design Interactive students working on physical product design to use the cutting-edge rapid prototyping tools and technologies the Makerspace has to offer.
Over the long term, Meyer said, she hopes Design Interactive will give students a sense of the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration before they embark on their careers. “It’s important for designers and engineers and business leaders to come together and understand each other,” Meyer said.
In addition, “You have to defend your design decisions when you present them to a company,” she said. “You want to be able to defend those decisions with regard to how your design will impact the people who use it, and Design Interactive will give us a place to practice doing that.”
Students from all disciplines at UW–Madison can now join an inclusive student organization to take their design knowledge and skills to the next level.
Learn more and join the Slack channel on the Design Interactive website.
To explore all CDIS student organizations, visit this page.