I was a guest lecturer at University College Dublin during the 2011-2012 and 2012-13 academic years for two courses. The first was IS20060 – Information Design.

Historically this course was primarily focused on desktop publishing – covering page layout fundamentals using Adobe InDesign. I was asked to expand it to include design concepts across media and include some of the fundamental underpinning around information design and cognition. Topics included design fundamentals and best practices, objectives, trends, user interface design, and urban design. We discussed the Helvetica documentary, the golden ratio, interesting web site architecture challenges, SEO and search, and lots of infographics – good and bad.

We did do the InDesign project of years past, but to augment and update I also I lectured and assigned students to give presentations using a web-based presentation-building platform called Prezi. It uses an interesting method of grouping and forced perspective to assist in establishing relationships. It’s a fun tool to experiment with – slides “pan” and “zoom” in and out to allow for contextual grouping of topics as the presentation proceeds. It was a very fun course.