Making as Pedagogical Practice in HCI: From Artifacts to Theory building

This paper introduces the notion of making as a pedagogical practice in HCI education. Our focus is on generative design teaching in HCI that prioritizes collaborative engagements across a wide range of material encounters. We take the view that HCI education without a critical view of the relationship between people and objects results in abstract reasoning that runs the risk of an impoverished basis in praxis. To support this position, we provide a series of examples from our own teaching. Through these examples we locate our work in the field of new materiality and post-human design asking the question: How can HCI education account for the material turn? We observe that there is important theory-building work to be done in this area and propose some methods and a direction this work could take. HCI education remains dominated by an instrumentalist, problem-solving, evaluative approach. We suggest meaning making through material exploration can invigorate the discipline with a new design praxis.