Part 2 of 2 It strikes me as a valid and useful point to establish User Experience as a pole around which numerous disciplines, activities, and concerns revolve. A pole around which things revolve at different and varying orbits seems very different from the idea of "enveloping," "containing," "grabbing," or "encompassing."
I won't get into the idea of calling oneself a "User Experience Designer" as opposed to an "Interaction Designer," etc.. I've called myself an Interaction Designer since 1987, when I first heard the term (via Bill Moggeridge and Bill Verplank at IDTwo), though I'd been practicing it as a consultant since 1983, and it was my intent in 1983 coming out of design school to pursue a new "architecture of the dynamic interrelationships between function, affordances, and usage." This seemed to me to be the next logical progression of the architecture and design fields, and was crystallized shortly after my graduation with the arrival of the first Macintosh, which seemed to me to embody nearly all of these principals among all of its various design aspects, from industrial design, to software, to interactive affordances (the mouse), to graphic design, to branding and identity. I've been able to successfully pursue Interaction Design (or User Experience Design) with my work including or overlapping with many other related disciplines for over a quarter of a century, and have never considered the challenges in communicating what I do to be overwhelming or all that difficult. I show my clients and others the work that I've done, which has grown to become quite an enormous and diverse resource. That, along with a simple explanation of how my work (and that of my colleagues and co-consultants) brings together many of these concerns and disciplines has always worked for me/us. When I had the opportunity to become an executive, I chose the term "Chief Experience Officer" because I saw that as encompassing the things I saw myself as responsible for answering to. Our broad and diverse field occupies a very interesting and important part of the creative and development fields. I made peace with the inherent difficulty in classifying/categorizing this type of work early on, by recognizing that there's a big component of integration and reconciliation to Interaction Design/UX. In some ways our architecture and design is embodied as the negative space between and integrating all of the tangible aspects of environments, buildings, products, software, systems, and services. That's why it's difficult to present as a photograph, like a skyscraper or a sleekly styled product. User Experience is only discoverable and discernable though usage. It's a paradox that I would urge this broad and diverse field to come to peace with, as I did nearly a quarter century ago. It will always come down to the same directive: Just stop talking and do the work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=40789 ________________________________________________________________ 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
