It Could Just as Well Have Been in Greek: Experiences from Introducing Code as a Design Material to Exhibition Design Students

Abstract

This paper discusses the experience and learning from introducing programming in a museum exhibition design course. Thirty-seven information design students from Sweden, with no previous experience in programming, participated in the course in 2014 and 2015. The students' tasks were to create interactive exhibition stations at a county museum in five weeks. We introduced Arduino and Processing programming in the course to enlarge the information design students' repertoire and to find ways to develop the interactive aspects of the exhibition medium. We aim to identify and discuss challenges and strengths when introducing code as design material in design education. The education of future exhibition designers is an important matter relevant the TEI community.