On teaching and learning

I’ve now taught close to ninety students across four semesters at a German university, alongside the day job — interface and screen design, and a new web-development course this term. I started because I wanted to give something back. I’ve kept going because of what it quietly gives me.

Teaching forces you to say what you actually believe. In daily design work you lean on instinct; you put the button where it feels right. In front of students, “it feels right” doesn’t survive — you have to name the principle, and now and then you find out you didn’t really have one. Co-writing the study booklet for the course was the sharpest version of that: turning years of practice into something a stranger can follow is a brutal, useful test of how well you understand it yourself.

The thing students mention most isn’t the lectures. It’s the written feedback — detailed, specific, on every single submission. It takes ages, and it’s the part I refuse to cut, because feedback is where the learning actually happens. I’d rather teach thirty people properly than perform for three hundred.

And it loops back. The same instinct — explain the why, pair on the problem, leave people more capable than you found them — is exactly what a design system needs from whoever tends it. I thought I was going off to teach. Mostly, I went back to school.