On 12/18/07, pauric <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was > wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in > our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction > Designers....
Fun thread.. I remember that moment for me very clearly. I was in college studying technical writing and fully expecting to graduate, move to the Bay Area, and write technical manuals for Adobe when it happened. I was programming a sound on my newly acquired (this was 1997 or 8) Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer when I noticed that the pitch fine tune parameter was a lot different than I was used to seeing it. On most digital (or analog/digital hybrid) synthesizers (of that time and before, anyway), sound parameters could be set at a value between 0 and 127. This is *completely arbitrary* and is an artifact of MIDI, a language that lets electronic musical instruments tell one another what to do. MIDI is a 7-bit language. Seven bits can only represent 128 distinct values, so musicians were stuck with setting things up how the machines needed them to be... not how *they* needed them to be. What was different about the K2000 was that the pitch fine tune parameter was in cents, an actual unit of pitch and something that many musicians and most sound designers would understand. It hit me that someone took the time to adapt the machine to the musician rather than being lazy and doing it the other way round. And then it hit me that I wanted to be one of those people who took the time to figure that stuff out and design for it... I wanted to design user interfaces! Ideally, I wanted to design synthesizer user interfaces, but I haven't gotten the opportunity to do that yet, but designing for the Web has been highly entertaining. I switched the focus of my major to UI design, took some different courses, and grabbed a very timely opportunity to help set up a usability lab for the university's Web development team. From that moment, I have never looked back... F. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
