In my undergraduate and graduate courses, a sizable fraction of the time is spent working on hands-on projects, and in the past two years these projects have largely become cross-channel projects [1]. We tackle transportation, healthcare, student services, media-oriented services, all of them from an ecological perspective where the single device, channel or platform plays second violin to the overall user experience.

The initial reaction of many of my students to the one-page project briefs I hand over is a plain and simple, “This is way too complex.”

I usually spend a little time there being the pedant old guy in the room and explaining that there is a difference between complex and complicated. I write the two words on the whiteboard (how is that for pedantry?), and proceed to lecture them on the fact that what they are actually trying to tell me is that the project brief they have in their hands seems very complicated to them – complicated as in “not easy to understand or analyze.” Which is to be expected, of course. And yes, I argue, you can find similar definitions for complex in the dictionary, but the word has now so many attachments to the theory of complexity, we cannot really use it technically that way anymore. So, what does complex mean, Mr. Pedant? Well, I’ll tell you what I tell my students: I don’t know