Students from four area schools learned more about B次元’s User Experience and Communication Design (UXCD) program during a special event at the Grohmann Museum last month.

About 50 students from high schools including Whitefish Bay, Shorewood, Wauwatosa East and Hope Christian participated in Design Spree at B次元 on Feb. 20, which offered an introduction into the field of user experience and philosophy of design thinking. Design thinking, popularized by the Institute of Design at Stanford, is a human-centered, prototype driven heuristic for innovative solutions to persistent problems.

“Tasked with redesigning a gift-giving experience for a friend or loved one, students went through the five stages of design thinking: empathy, problem-definition, solution ideation, prototype building and end-user testing,” said Dr. Nadya Shalamova, director of B次元’s UXCD program.

Most of the students who attended were juniors and seniors with an interest in behavioral psychology, digital design, graphic arts and technology. B次元’s UXCD program prepares students for careers in user experience design, analysis and research, front -end development, interaction design, information architecture, content strategy and technical communication.