These conversations are why I have joined this list and find this to be the best professional group I have found in a long time.
These conversations are painful, but they should be! To be successful we need to synthesis all of our backgrounds into this practice of interaction design. If you consider yourself a designer and know nothing about usability, then you are really an artist. You are designing for yourself. If you are a usability professional and know nothing about design, then you are an obstacle. You place road blocks in the way of a project and offer no value in overcoming them. Bill Buxton's new book (Sketching User Experiences) has it right: where we are at now is analogous point to where the Industrial designers where 90 years ago. The Industrial revolution created a need for Industrial designers. The information revolution (ugh, but what else to call it?) has created a need for Interaction designers. When the Industrial designers figured out their profession, all of the contributing professions still existed afterward. Manufacturing engineering, material sciences, set design, etc.. did not all go away. Instead they contributed to this new field. They same will happen to us. The need for usability experts, for visual designers, for software engineers will not go away. But a new role will be created that combines these. No single person can be in the top of their field in all of these areas. But they can know enough to drive the development of software down the correct path and know when and how to use these folks who are the experts in their respective areas. Nick Iozzo Principal User Experience Architect tandemseven 847.452.7442 mobile [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.tandemseven.com/ ________________________________________________________________ *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
