well...
Stylistically... I wish I was that impressed with myself and my
vocabulary. Serious attempts at hair splitting specificity throw
roadblock in front of the reader. Plain speak please... that is if
your intended audience is the broader section of designers... and not
the intellectual elite.
With heavy influence from my mentor I use these four simple rules...
1) Read everything in the domain. Yes, there is a lot of crap and
drivel written in the interactive space. Emerging and growing
industries with high salaries will always attract folks using books to
further their career. Use your passion and your wits to filter out the
BS.
2) Do most of your reading outside of your domain. A wider selection
of ideas is better... and most innovation is about slight variances
and reapplication of existing theories. If you want to really make a
difference in your domain, bring something fresh and applicable.
3) Have a life. The critical component to what we do is our insight
into human nature. Machines are relatively predictable. I do not
believe confining yourself to the studio for 70 - 90 hours a week is a
recipe for excellence.
4) Find your own voice. Have a passionate point of view. Know what you
think. You don't have to write about it... frankly, you might be
better off not writing about it. This has huge implications for number
1.
There are a tremendous number of bright folks in our industry. When I
talk to those doing the work I find that the people with the most
insight apparently don't feel the need to express it in a blog or a
book. I love working with smart passionate people.
Mark
ps... I did not miss the article's point, just picked the portion that
was of interest to me.
"Trust me, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back for some notional
superior acuity."
On Dec 13, 2009, at 10:51 AM, Dan Saffer wrote:
What do we think about Adam Greenfield's challenge to us?
"The ahistoricity of interaction design – the notion, implicitly
held or otherwise, that rich interactivity is an entirely new topic
in design for human experience, perhaps with the Doug Engelbart demo
as Year Zero – has always driven me nuts. When even an old-school
HCI stalwart like Don Norman fails to deliver useful insight,
perhaps it’s time to start looking further afield for inspiration.
Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been
thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which
elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to
user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic
urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate
transitional spaces between public and fully private that might
still usefully inform the design of digital applications and
services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those
of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is
risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX
“community” and the technology industry that supports it).
A bookshelf that runs no deeper than John Maeda, in other words,
isn’t going to get you very far, or help you in the true crunch, and
nothing makes me sadder than coming across someone engaged in the
design of user experiences whose blogroll or Twitter follow list
extends no further than the usual UX names...my feeling is that
there are better and deeper sources of insight available if you dig
a little in the history of adjacent design disciplines.
You can learn to do a decent card sort (excuse me: “content affinity
analysis”) in ten minutes, and work competently with Arduino in a
good solid month of effort, but if you’re genuinely concerned with
improving the quality of interactive experience, I believe you owe
it both to yourself and to the people downstream from you who’ll be
using the things you make to gain a richer acquaintance with the
thought of other, older design traditions."
Read the whole article: <http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/dimensions-of-design/
>
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