Category: teaching design

Teaching and Academic Research

I teach UX and UI Design and Web Design I and II at CUNY New York City College of Technology. I have also taught UX bootcamps and workshops at General Assembly, NYC Code and Design Academy and various technology incubators in both classroom and corporate environments.

I am available to teach workshops and tutorials for your team and at industry events. Contact me for information.

Academic CV
CUNY COMD Portfolio

Classroom Teaching

CUNY NYC College of Technology, Brooklyn, NY (2019-2023)

  • COMD 2451: Web Design I Introduction to HTML and CSS
  • COMD 3551: Web Design II Advanced HTML and CSS
  • COMD 3562: UX & UI Design

General Assembly, UX Design Intensive, New York, NY (2019)

NYC Code and Design Academy, New York, NY (2017-2018)

Research Projects

Trust and Safety in Online Environments

Accessible Science Gateways

Archiving Theater Legacies

User Experience in Digital Libraries

Information Architecture in Wikipedia

Guest Lectures

COMD 3551: Web Design II, Communication Design, CUNY New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn, NY. Fall 2022.

COMD 3563: Web Traffic & Analytics, Communication Design, CUNY New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn, NY. Fall 2022.

Service Design Workshop. MPA Capstone Course, colin Powell School of Public Administration, CUNY City College, New York, NY. Spring 2019

Women in Entrepreneurship. Columbia University, New York, NY. Fall 2018

UX Career Panel. User Experience Design Immersive, General Assembly, New York, NY. Summer 2018

Mentoring Women in STEM. Union County College, Union, NJ. Spring 2016

Digital Infrastructure: From Storage to Content Management Solutions. Pratt Institute, New York, NY. Fall 2013

Community Information Technology Initiative. Municipal Art Society/Bushwick High School, New York, NY. Fall 2004

Real Estate Market Data Sources on the Internet. New York University, New York, NY. 1996-1998

Internet Resources for Real Estate. The Appraisal Institute, Long Island, NY. Fall 1996

Web Design. Little Wound Middle School, Pine Ridge, SD. Fall 1996

Web Design. North Middle School, Rapid City, SD. Fall 1996

Internet Real Estate Resources for Asset Management. Prudential Realty Group, Newark, NJ. 1995

Incubators and Hackathon Programs

Columbia Venture Community Project 2.8 (2022)
Essteem Equalithon (2018-2023)
Impact Hub NYC (2017, 2018, 2022)
Open Camps (2016)
Startup Leadership Program (2017, 2018, 2020)
Technology Transfer Days (20

Conference Workshops and Tutorials

IAC: The Information Architecture Conference (2021, 2023)
UX-LX: User Experience Lisbon (2023)
Science Gateways Community Institute (2016, 2019, 2021)
OWASP Foundation (2015)

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Losing Our Third Place

Three women in a liminal space. Digital art generated by Night Cafe.
Three women in a liminal space. Digital art generated by Night Cafe.

I have been working from home for a couple decades, so a number of things were new for me during the COVID pandemic, and the hardest was probably having everyone else at home with me. My husband and my eldest who was in college and studying remotely, and occasionally my youngest who was in off-campus housing at college in New Orleans, but ended up back at home due to COVID and storm evacuations.

During this time, I needed to change my routine. Sharing my office with my husband was difficult because he took frequent calls that broke my concentration and he’s a noisy typer. I moved my “office” to my son’s room and had to negotiate when I could and couldn’t socialize or use the kitchen, since everyone’s lunch schedules were all a bit different.

The other thing that was different was that my normally “out of the house” activities were also back in house. I teach at a local college that was online for several semesters. (I’ve been teaching on campus for the past semester, with some online weeks, but a lot of students are still in hybrid classes). The evening meetups and other professional networking that I used to go out for a night or two a week were still happening from home, which can be awkward when the family expects to eat and relax together normally at that time.

Posting the schedule on the door or through a shared calendar has been helpful for coordinating my family activities. My husband or one of my kids cook dinner and feed the cat on the nights when I have an evening meetup or when I am teaching online, just as they would have done when I wasn’t here. Taking calls outside when the weather cooperates was also helpful, though not ideal. The alternative to evening meetups was to find similar activities during the day, and I found quite a lot that fit my schedule, but it meant negotiating midday things again.

My students at CUNY City Tech, who are mostly college junior and seniors, are also only now getting to classes on campus. They have been under a lot of stress about finding internships and post-college jobs and generally negotiating their own living spaces with family. Having to attend school from home was one of the added stresses that pandemic lockdown caused for students. And negotiating hybrid schedules can be exhausting.

A few semesters ago at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a student I’ll call Fatima who was attending my class from home. Her brother was also at attending school from home and space was tight. Fatima complained to me that her mom was always on her to clean up and complaining about why she wasn’t doing her part. It was causing her a lot of stress worrying about sick relatives, schoolwork, and extra home chores on top of it all, when she would normally be taking classes on campus and have had the “excuse” of not being at home.

I think what was going on at her house and in the homes of many of my students at the time was similar to what was happening with household supply shortages at the beginning of pandemic lockdown, where things you would normally use at work or school were now being purchased and used at home. Only for Fatima, instead of a shortage of toilet paper and bleach, there was a shortage of liminal space, the time and physical passages between her school and home life, that allowed her to adjust to and negotiate the activities that happen in those spaces.

Fatima was at home. Her brother was at home. Her mom and dad were also at home. The stress of being the busy student, helpful daughter, and goofy friend crammed in one space was exhausting. When her mom was complaining about the mess, Fatima was operating in busy student mode, not helpful daughter mode, which caused conflict.

What seemed to click for Fatima and a lot of my students was the idea of the lost “Third Places” or those special places and conditions outside of home or school or work that define different aspects of our being, but that are now collapsed into a less private and more awkward home/Zoom life. Interestingly, Fatima’s mother was losing her third place, as well. She used to have space at home that was her own to be who she was when she was not surrounded by all the extra activity, people and messes that everyone, her children, her husband, living in the same space all the time created.

And with hybrid classes and workspaces continuing to conflate our work, home, social, spiritual, and mental lives, conflict and negotiation will likely continue as we sort out these disparate spaces. It is important to recognize these conflicts, and to be a lot more forgiving of ourselves and others as we negotiate this new way of living. Because we aren’t back to “normal” yet, if we ever will be.

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Ethical Design: Evaluating Digital and IRL Experiences (and how one might support or hinder the other)

During the Winter 2022 intercession, I took part in the Living Lab General Education Seminar which is described on its website as follows:

The seminar is designed to make General Education more visible in our classrooms and courses. We will build an engaging environment for learning through exploration, implementation, and assessment of a variety of proven teaching practices using Oral Communication, Quantitative Literacy, Reading, Writing as our focus this year.

Living Lab General Education Seminar

In this course we learned how to apply High Impact Educational Principles and strategies for Place-Based Learning to create rewarding learning experiences for our students and colleagues.

The culmination of the course was to create a new or redesigned course assignment or project targeting one of the General Education Learning Goals and to implement it during the Spring 2022 semester. A complete description of my activity is located in the L4: Living Lab Learning Library.

The Exercise 

In a Data for Good lecture at Columbia’s Data Science Institute, dana boyd of Data+Society told the audience that her proudest achievements are often when she convinces a client not to create something that can potentially do harm.  

When does it make sense to NOT make a digital version of something that would be better designed IRL? Are there activities that are more suited to online than IRL? Or are there cases where a combination of both are appropriate? 

In this exercise, I shared a few articles about online activities that have had an impact on real life. We discussed both positive and negative reviews of online activities, including Pokemon Go (The Guardian), which is often  discussed in terms of its getting gamers to be more social and active, to Instagram (Wall Street Journal), which has been shown to have a negative effect on the self-esteem of teenaged girls. A third example was on how social media use during the pandemic is exacerbating to the political polarization of America (Harvard Berkman Klein Center) by removing the public commons from physical space to largely anonymous forums. 

After discussing these articles, students formed breakout groups to find a news article about an online activity and discussed the pros and cons of that activity online. And to also discuss how that activity could be replaced by or combined with an “In Real Life” (IRL) activity to improve the experience. Finally, they posted a reflection on the exercise to the class Slack group. 

High Impact Learning

This activity focuses on three learning outcomes: Reading, Information Literacy and Ethical Thinking. Students are asked to read an assigned text describing Digital vs IRL spaces and then in select an example from the reading of a digital experience that might be better In Real Life or paired with an IRL experience. After discussing in groups, they then share back to the class what they discussed and finally post a reflection on course discussion board about their understanding of the pros and cons of digital vs IRL for the chosen scenario.  

To address Information Literacy, students must find one additional example of digital applications where the IRL experience takes precedence over digital. What might someone gain from a physical experience that they can’t get from digital? When might a digital application enhance the IRL experience?  

And to expand their understanding of who is impacted by their design decisions, they then work in groups to make a stakeholder map (Giordano et al, 2018) showing who is affected by the designed experience of their chosen example. Who is participating in the experience? Who else might be affected by the experience? Or harmed? Who might be left out?  

In addition to the reading, information literacy and ethical thinking student learning outcomes, students gain gain from two High Impact Education Practices: Place Based Learning and Collaborative Assignments.  

Place-Based Learning: Students consider the physical and embodied experiences of IRL versus digital experiences  

Collaborative Assignments: Students participate in discussion of the pros and cons of selected digital experiences 

Outcomes and Future Development

This activity was part of the Ethics and Accessibility lecture in Week 7 of the Spring 2022 semester. It took a little over a half hour to complete. There was no out-of-class time except if a student wishes to post their reflection after class. If we had more time (and were not otherwise online this week) we might have been able to go outside and play Pokemon Go or survey people about their online and offline political activity on campus grounds. We may still try to create an online/IRL activity during a later session and follow up with a stakeholder map, which we did not have time to do. 

The activity was low stakes and ungraded. The only preparation was to find three articles to discuss as examples of Online activities that either replace or compromise IRL experiences. Because this assignment is ungraded, I plan to use it as part of the participation grade. I do not believe my course is part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative. It is an elective. 

Students enjoyed discussing online versus “In Real Life” very much. They are very aware of online activities that are creating unrealistic expectations for their real-life relationships and are concerned about exacerbating these experiences through their design careers. I would like to refine the activity and possibly replace a duller accessibility study that they do for credit and that could be done in class in groups or as a demonstration. Not being able to go outside or actually be IRL was an issue with this activity, though some students mentioned that it made it easier for everyone in their group to search for articles since they were all sitting at a computer anyway. 

Resources and Reflections 

My activity presentation for the Living Lab course is openly available at https://cuny907-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/noreen_whysel27_login_cuny_edu/EeDP7sDKTAROh1Nle8uKlagB5bMXEem7EM4k6Lvh7nagBA?e=FgnQIx 

You can also read about this and other OER activities on the course blog at https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/l4/2022/03/28/ethical-design-evaluating-digital-and-irl-experiences-and-how-one-might-support-or-hinder-the-other/

The Slack channel where students posted their reflections is a private discussion space for students of the HE93 section of COMD3562. I will post an image with student names anonymized to show an example of the written output from this assignment. Students who wish to post their reflections publicly will be able to reply to the post on Open Lab. 

This article was originally posted on March 28, 2022 on CUNY Open Lab.

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The Occasional Mentor: Kill Your Darlings

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR is a semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience.

Kill Your Darlings

I am working on a project with a friend who is acting as a client for a capstone project with an agile development class. She complained to me that the students were unable to create a simple one-sheet deliverable featuring a proposed design. The problem: WordPress hasn’t been set up yet. It didn’t occur to them that they could mock it up in a drawing program or simply sketch it by hand.

When I do in-class studios, I will often make the design students work entirely on paper and whiteboard, no computers allowed, to ideate and create a paper prototype. It can be done in two hours end to end. Is the final deliverable App Store ready? Of course not. But it is enough to move quite a bit toward a testable idea.

Students today, and especially developers, don’t understand the power of a piece of paper that you can throw away. When you start coding (or drafting in WordPress) too soon, you get too married to the code, making it hard later on to incorporate new learnings from your user research. It’s better practice to stay as low fi as possible for as long as possible. That’s at least one day of a five day sprint. Sometimes two (testing the paper artifacts with users). Then “Kill your darlings” before they become too dear.

Note: The phrase “Kill your darlings” (or “murder your babies”) is often attributed to William Faulkner and is a feature of many descriptions of the Beat poets: William Borroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac et al. In fact, the concept “murder your babies” can be traced to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British writer and literary critic in a 1916 lecture series at Cambridge. (Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur (2000) [1916]. “XII. On Style”. On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914 (Online ed.). Bartleby.com.)

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Downward Dot Voting

My friend Austin Govella wrote today on using a kind of whole-body dot voting to teach teams to “Vote With Your Feet“. We are in a Liminal Thinking group on Facebook where he initially threw his ideas around. I was excited that he chose to add my comment about using negative dots to vote down ideas, and use them in my undergraduate UX class as a discussion point about what we Won’t do or talk about on a project.

My students get to use dot voting on the first day of our UX/UI class at CUNY CityTech, where we talk about what we are worried about for the upcoming semester. Addressing concerns and potential problems is a good exercise in most occasions, but in these days of online classes, crushing economy and pandemic, talking about our worries is particularly important. It helps to alleviate anxiety and develop a growth mindset toward the months ahead.

In this first class, the students learn about a number of design practices using a shared, online whiteboard, including brainstorming, dot voting, cluster analysis, and Kanban as part of a pre-mortem exercise on what can go wrong with the class. (I learned this exercise while teaching with Jimmy Chandler at the New York Code and Design Academy and modified it for online classes).

To begin, students use virtual sticky notes to write down their concerns about the coming semester. Then the students attach green and red mini circles, three each, to vote on which issues they want to discuss and which ones they don’t. Then we use Kanban (To do, Doing, Done) to keep the discussion orderly.

When I used the technique earlier on, I allowed each student three dots to vote on ideas that they want to discuss. There are usually concerns expressed that are common students commuting to our downtown Brooklyn campus, like getting to class on time (what if the subway breaks down? what if my work goes overtime?), having too much homework (it is a lot of homework, tbh), or dealing with a teammate that doesn’t pull their share (this happens on the job, too, unfortunately). It was OK. But these concerns, being fairly common are covered in the syllabus in the items about time management, group behavior and attendance, so the discussion becomes somewhat procedural.

There are of course new and now-common issues this semester about logging into school instead of commuting, managing family and job expectations, particularly for those students whose families rely on their job income and dealing with the combined stress of school, real and potential loss of family members (at least two of my students had a COVID death in the family and many have been displaced or ill), and just living in the 2020 political and budgetary climate. These issues are very personal and went largely unspoken but manifested as concerns about deadlines, time management and doubts that they have the skills it takes to be successful.

By allowing the students to select some issues that are not particularly a concern was a new idea and I found it especially interesting to explore them with the class. So along with items that have a lot of upvotes, I also selected items that have some upvotes, but also a few downvotes (more than one downvote, so as not to put any one person on the spot).

“Not a Concern” is key phrasing. For the upvote dots, I told the students to “mark items they want to talk about.” For downvote dots, the instructions are “mark items that are Not a Concern.” Te fact that someone wrote the issue on a sticky note in the first place means it is a concern for some students. I inferred from the “Not a Concern” votes that maybe there are people who have discovered ways to deal with the problem.

And for a teacher, it highlights differences in each class (there are always differences) that point to certain pedagogical approaches. For instance in one section the most up-voted concern was “potential weakness in design skills.” In the other section, a similar issue got a lot of down-votes. I wanted to know what was going on so made sure to expand on that concern in the second week’s discussion and begin a discussion of skills development, the importance of practice, and imposter syndrome.

This then becomes an opportunity for a discussion of growth. I tell them to ask themselves, How can I, as a student in a rigorous BFA program, discover ways to develop perspective so I understand where the doubt is coming from? How can I build confidence? Through practice, time management and simply being honest about the particularly stressful challenges this world is throwing at us and asking for help.

So cheers to Austin for giving me a fun topic to explore here. While you are at it, you can find his book, Collaborative Product Design at https://www.agux.co/cpd.