STAR framework revisited: Curriculum for user-centered design summer schools

Annually, an interdisciplinary community of students, researchers and practitioners gather together to participate in intensive summer school sessions focused on the teaching and practice of User-Centered Design (UCD). By listening to lectures, working in ateliers, living with target users and facing real-world design problems, participants experientially learn a mixture of UCD processes, ethnographic methods, prototyping techniques and teamwork skills, despite the program’s short duration. Organizing and implementing such programs in ways that optimize the learning process is challenging. As former participants, atelier leaders and instructors for UCD summer schools, the authors made several poignant observations about the need for a formal framework for this learning context. By examining existing educational literature, performing ethnographic research and conducting interviews with past students, atelier leaders, lecturers and organizers, the authors developed the STAR Framework for UCD summer schools. [see Schadewitz, Adler, Moncur, Roberts,