On Oct 9, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Shaun Bergmann wrote: > You wake tomorrow morning still the Interaction Designer you are > today, but > you are suddenly gifted with absolutely every tidbit of knowledge and > skillset required to do EVERYTHING in your project. > ... you are still the Interaction Designer you were last night when > you > went to bed, but now you have the skillset required to guarantee > the system > is going to react and breathe exactly as you have already planned out. > > The fact that you have the skillset to make this happen from the > top down > and backwards -- does not suddenly render you less capable of > Design. If > anything, you have more power to get exactly what you dreamt of.
Let's say your hypothetical IxD practitioner now has the 'full da Vanci' and qualifies for the Microsoft job, all the way from the server iron out to the user's retina, with a small excursion through computer-aided search architecture. Now, how many projects can Mr. da Vinci work on at once? Two? Three? Five? Sorry, Vince -- you're too valuable on the search design project. We need you to stay on it 24/7 from inception to launch. While you're at it, be thinking about what you can do with versions N +1 and N+2, because you're just _too_ good at this. The fact that some rare individual may have the skillset to make it happen from the top down doesn't mean that that is the best use of a trained IxD's time in a large organization like Microsoft. Hiring multiple people with _overlapping_ competencies means you have a team that has enough bandwidth to handle several projects at once. The bottom line here is that the hiring manager wants to get this done with _one employee_, instead of the IxD, software dev, and software-developer-in-test that the job description really calls for. He might find that individual, but he's not going to get more than one project shoved through his underpaid star player at a time, whether he tries to or not. Will Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
