> 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....
Great thread! For me, it happened twice. The first time, I was a fledgling web code monkey tasked with a redesign for an employer's site. As I went along, I got so consumed with the IA, interaction, and flow of the site, that I ended up creating this ... thing ... I had no idea I had in me. Seriously - it was a big surprise. I was gosh dern proud of my work, and was receiving so many compliments on it, that I simply decided design was my favorite thing in the world and I had to spend the rest of my life doing it. Then I discovered Flash and saw all the wonderful potential there. Started doing tons of Flash design work, and eventually realized I needed to become a far better programmer in order to accomplish the things I wanted to do. So I moved from a position of designing eLearning courses to being a hardcore Flash developer in the Engineering dept of a major eLearning company. I continued this for another employer. Prior to this, I wrote my first book, on Flash design basics (Flash Out of the Box), did a ton of articles on Flash, and generally spent way too much time as a GMC tester for Macromedia's beta program. In other words, I got sucked into the world of programming for about 2 years, straying pretty far from design work but still struggling to do it as much as I could. The whole time this was going on, I was all about the design of interactive experiences. I hated writing code. Interaction design was always part of my job and was always the best part of my job. I just didn't know it had a name, and I thought it was the cool, bonus stuff I got to do while I had some downtime from programming. I was always the user advocate, always focused on application and human behavior, but I was ... trapped ... in this awful world of code and bug reports. Then one day, I read "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". And I suddenly became very focused. That was the second time I became an interaction designer. (Strangely, I've since denounced almost everything I learned from that book, but that's a different story.) I left the programming world, focused 100% on interaction design - the things I always loved about my previous jobs, and more - and the rest is history. I'm now writing my second book on web application design. In fact, it's what I should be working on right now, instead of this post! Thanks again for a great thread. -r- ________________________________________________________________ *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
