Web Design Education in Context

With audiences becoming more technologically literate and the web a catalyst for political, cultural and socio-economic change and debate, the practice of designing for the web is no longer a task only for web developers and graphic designers. Thus, organisations need to make room for experts who understand the dynamics of communication in the web context. From this perspective, we revised the curriculum of the web design course for undergraduate Communication Sciences students at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. We distanced ourselves from a producer-centered classic curriculum, and proposed a process-centered one that facilitates reflection on the different aspects of using digital content as a communication context. This change of approach in how we teach web design led us to improve students’ critical skills in evaluating digital media, encourage their creativity in designing for the web as a communication space, and help them understand the complexity of web design as a process.