This paper aims to study graphic designers' views on knowledge, considering the challenges faced by the field today. Expressing thoughts about what is needed for a graphic designer to build professional confidence, interview respondents mentioned topics like historical knowledge as well as feedback and presentation skills. To facilitate the navigation of the ever-changing graphic design landscape and to build a solid professional identity, externalising tacit knowledge is a key issue. The study finds that graphic designers mainly talk about their design work when presenting to clients, primarily with the aim of convincing them to accept new proposals. A case can therefore be made for the necessity of developing graphic designers' skills when it comes to explicating design processes with the aim of making it clear to non-designers what it actually is that a graphic designer knows and does, as well as building a stronger theoretical foundation for the profession.

This paper presents a design teaching approach that aims to support students to shift their approach when exploring, prototyping and testing user interactions with physcical products. This is conducted in a bttom-up, iterative manner to change the perspective from focusing on the opportunities of user-involvement during the form-giving process, rather than prematurely stressing the design outcome. Instead of emphasising on aesthetics and appearance, the desing approach emphasises how users perceive, interact with and experience products.

Through a series of workshops, a pedagogical approach was developed for exploring and designing user actions with physical products, based on the notion of ’action layers’. Action layers offer a mindset of designing, which facilitates understanding of, and design for, intuitive and tangible interaction. The approach builds on product semantics and emphasises cognitive and action-based paradigms to create intuitive and embodied information-for-use.

Action layers present product interaction as a sequence of four steps; invite, engage, enable, and confirm. In the workshops, students iteratively explored form, prototyped and tested interaction with users through sketching with physical models, starting with minimal surface and edge treatments, eventually ending up with functional cues and meaningful form for a certain product type and environment. Through testing and evaluation, students learn to understand user behaviour, relate to their own expectations and intent to the design situation, and iteratively improve the design.

The outcomes suggest that students advance their insights on how users interpret, respond to and interact with products, which consequently extends their ability to design products better suited for use.