Hi Rein, In the specific case you described, having a visual design skill would help a bit. As a designer (with industrial and graphic design background), I've always felt much more confortable when I used to do information architecture and wireframes for websites/software interface projects. But I have some friends doing the same stuff who have no former visual design education/skills, and they did a fine job as well.
So, I would say it would be a "nice to have" skill, but not needed. What is needed is a good visual designer working along with you. And I would like to broaden the discussion. To me Interaction Design is neither (only) about visual, nor it is about creating wireframes. If you take a look on what is being done in most Interaction Design schools, you will notice that the "screen based" applications belongs to the past. As interaction designers, we have to think about the future, where computers are embedded to ordinary objects. Some interfaces are more in "industrial design" rather than in "visual design" basis. I would suggest you to take a look at: Design Interactions at Royal College of Art - http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/ Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University - http://design.cmu.edu/show_program.php?s=2&t=3 Banff New Media Institute - http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/about/ Interaction Design Centre in Middlesex University - http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/idc/ Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design - http://ciid.dk/ Media Lab at University of Art and Design Helsinki - http://mlab.taik.fi/ M.I.T. Media Lab: http://www.media.mit.edu/research/ And also: Design for the Elastic Mind, at MoMA - http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ Ambient Intelligence, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, augmented reality...these things are changing the scope of our work, and we better have a broader vision of what interaction design is all about, in order to be able to create good interaction! Taking these examples, I would change your question to: Can an interaction designer creat great working interaction without having computer science skills? Most of this works and Labs I've listed above demand a strong prototyping practice, and a basic understanding on computational stuff. Visual design skill is nice to have. What about computer science skills? all the best -- prof. mauro pinheiro universidade federal do espírito santo centro de artes depto. de desenho industrial http://www.feiramoderna.net On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:35 AM, R. Groot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > > in my daily work as an interaction designer I mostly create wireframes and > support the visual designers in their creation of the visual design for > these wireframes. > > I notice though, that there is a strong dependency on how/if the interaction > will work and the (eventual) visual design. > > My question: can an interaction designer create great working interaction > without having visual design skills? > > Kind regards, > Rein Groot > ________________________________________________________________ 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
