Building Common Ground: Applying Mutual Learning in the UI/UX Education

The spreading of information and communication technology and mobile applications in our everyday contexts retrieve attention to UI/UX design. The education field attempted to train qualified UI/UX professionals to address the job market. However, there is a visible gap between the requirements of education and of professionalization in the job market. The interdisciplinary collaboration and communication with other team members from different fields play a cortical role in UI/UX education. To address the needs, we apply the concept of mutual learning in participatory design practices to design a UI/UX curriculum to enhance students' capacity in interdisciplinary collaboration. We conduct a pilot study to test the mutual learning course design in a joint course of graduate students from industrial design and computer science fields. Students were teamed up for a design project. In the class, they helped their teammates from different fields learn their domain knowledge and the thinking model of problem-solving. At the end of the course, we conducted interviews of twelve students in the course and collected their feedback on the mutual learning course design. The results showed that mutual learning benefited interdisciplinary communication and enabled the students to empathize with their team members of professions.