Designing Communication Design

Innovating in the field of new media genres requires methods for producing designs that can succeed in being disseminated and used outside of design research labs. This article uses the author's experiences with the development of university courses in communication design to address the research question: How can we design courses to give students the competencies they need to work as designers of new media? Based on existing approaches from UX design and other fields, I present a model that has demonstrated its usefulness in the development of commercial products and services. The model emphasises rapid techniques for user research and ideation; genre analysis; use of pitching and storytelling as a form of prototyping; and humanist methods for evaluation and critique.