Decolonial Design reflections in conversation with Peter Crnokrak
Education — 20 May 2024 · 6 min read
Why running a studio course is the closest thing to leading a product team
Abstract
Running a studio course and leading a product team are usually treated as separate careers. After several semesters teaching UX/UI prototyping and creative coding while shipping products, this essay argues they are the same practice: framing problems, giving critique that people can act on, designing constraints that produce good work, and knowing when to let go. Teaching is presented not as a side activity but as design training in its most honest form.
A course is a designed system
A semester has users with wildly different contexts, a constrained runtime, success metrics that resist measurement, and a hard deadline. Sound familiar? Every structural decision — how briefs are framed, when critique happens, what gets graded — shapes behavior exactly the way product decisions shape user behavior.
When students in Tandem started optimizing for impressive final presentations over durable handovers, the fix wasn't a lecture about values. It was changing the grading criterion to what the partner initiative could sustain after the students left. Incentive design, not exhortation.
Explaining is a prototype of understanding
The discipline of making a complex system explainable to someone encountering it for the first time is the same discipline as making an interface legible. Every time I've struggled to teach a concept, it's because I hadn't actually finished designing my own understanding of it. Students are ruthless usability testers of ideas.
What it signals
For hiring managers reading portfolios: a designer who teaches has verifiable, repeated experience doing the things senior roles actually require — framing ambiguous problems, giving critique that lands, running rooms of people with conflicting incentives, and explaining systems to non-experts. The lecture hall is a leadership practice space that happens to be called education.