On Mar 28, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Jon [GMAIL] wrote:
1. The language of "user experience designer" is demeaning, as it
implies that a designer first _makes_ an experience and then someone
_consumes_ it %u2013 that consumers are, on their own, unable to
experience things, and that an experience can be mass produced like a
hammer or a toaster. Implicit in this language is the sense of
control, power and ownership, and the idea that a consumer is
helpless to bring anything on their own to a moment in time. In
reality, people bring the complexity of their wants, needs, desires,
and world views to an experience, and this in turn actively changes
that experience.
Agreed.
Ironically, I feel the same way when people say IxD is about designing
human to human interaction, for the exact same reasons you list above.
Ultimately, that's why I've always gravitated towards things like
interface designer or digital product designer or software designer,
because I'm designing things in that case, even if those things
facilitate human to human exchanges.
Just saying...
2. The concept of "UX" presently has connotations to the corporate
middle manager who has no training in design and has little
experience making things. These UX Managers or UX Designers commonly
act as facilitators between subject matter experts and outside design
consultancies; while the facilitation is important, it's a far cry
from the complexity of actually doing design work (conducting
research, synthesizing data, giving form to ideas, etc). This role,
at least when found in the large enterprise, is viewed by many design
consultancies as a "watered down form of design". This is not to say
that everyone who has found themselves with this title is not doing
design work, but to point to a trend in corporations of designer as
facilitator rather than designer as creator.
Spot on and well said.
4. I urge everyone on this list to move beyond the urge to define our
profession (either by what it is, or by what it isn%u2019t) and
instead begin to debate and discuss cases, methods, and theory of our
work. In no time in my four years of undergraduate design education
did we explicitly define design; instead, we defined it implicitly by
doing it and then reflecting on what we had done and how we had done
it. We can provide a little value to the larger community by offering
a concise definition of our profession, but we can provide a lot of
value to the community by offering case studies, repeatable methods,
and a deep and broad theory of our work and how it relates to other
disciplines.
So I have to ask... Does an interaction designer need to know how to
draw? What does an interaction designer have to know how to do with
their own two hands that appears in the final shipping product AS
DESIGNED? That question seems to me something that should get resolved
openly by the IxDA. And if so, then maybe there needs to be more about
craft on the IxDA home page, and more explicit detail on samples and
examples of work.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. [email protected]
c. +1 408 306 6422
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