Erik: Why do you teach?


Lauren: So I teach because I’m constantly learning, and it’s – you know, I’m just always curious, that’s why I do what I do. Yeah I’m a researcher and designer, and so I’m always curious about the best way to make things for people. I’m always – now I’m curious about the best way to teach, especially teaching how to do research, which is kind of like this weird like a snake eating its tail. I do it for that reason, and I also do it because I take those things back to my professional design career. I think that there’s no better way to stay fresh than to be talking to the future designers. It’s funny. I learned this year that you don’t have to know much to be a good teacher. It’s more about kind of facilitating conversation between students, like a collection of students, and I’m only speaking from the level that I’ve been teaching at which is graduate level, and the students that I’ve been teaching, it’s a varied group. We have developers. We have educators. We have designers. So everybody has a very different skill set, a very different background, and they almost have – they have more to learn from each other than they do for me. I just kind of facilitate things, and I’m there to answer questions, and really, I’ve learned so much about the way that people learn and the way that they interact and how much you have to give them for them to be able to figure things out and how to structure stuff. And especially in the space that the school is trying to play in, in this kind of social enterprise space, there’s just so much energy, and there are so many amazing ideas, and to have that interjected into my day-to-day design work at Frog is amazingly beneficial. You know, I can have a really – not so great day. You know, at a design consultancy, and I go to school when I’m inspired, at the end of the four hours, I’m exhausted but I’m inspired, so it’s really rewarding. And also, selfishly, I do it because seeing people that I’ve taught, practicing what I’m doing, and feeling good about learning it, is awesome. It’s like an amazing feeling. I just had, you know, a couple of students that wrote me emails that said, when they were at this conference, this IXDA Conference in Boulder, how helpful the stuff that I taught them was, and I’ve seen them go out and practice the things that I’ve taught, and they’re amazing. And so it’s just – to be able to spread that knowledge is a reward in itself.