I don't know. You guys feel like you're under assault - with a good deal of justice, given that I explicitly use the phrase "pointing a finger" - and you're responding in kind. So I cop to more or less asking for that.
A big part of me also doesn't want to say, "You know what? It's a blog post." I thought those thoughts, I expressed them in public, and I believe in standing by the things I say. So sure, I'll own up to that too. But given all of that...you know what? It's a blog post. It was a post on my blog, a post where I tried to give voice to some of my sorrow that things turned out the way they have, and to tease out why the conversations I have with junior designers feel so airless and inward-turning. You don't much care for what I have to say, and that's fine. It's just one random guy's opinion. It's literally worth the paper it's printed on. Where I really sharply disagree, though, is with the idea that I write for some "intellectual elite": this is how I talk in real life, this is how I structure my thoughts on the page, and this is how all the people I respect structure their spoken and written thoughts as well. Would I need an editor, if I intended these words to wind up in print? Absolutely. But is my writing *inherently* arcane? No, it isn't. It's about par for the kind of material any undergraduate can expect to confront at any university worth the name, and if you have a problem with that, mark schraad, then maybe you should consider that the problem is yours and not mine. Christian, yes, I genuinely do find it very sad whenever someone adds me on Twitter, and I have a glance at their "following" list and it's all the usual suspects. I can't imagine why you'd think that was posturing or hyperbole. Some of the other points Dave makes above I can't respond to - because, with all due respect, Dave, I can't quite figure out what point you intended to make. Much of what you've written here, and in our past correspondence, looks like word salad to me; I read it and I re-read it and the words never quite resolve into a coherent picture. You'll have to forgive me for that. So where do we stand? I said some not-particularly-diplomatic stuff in a not-particularly-constructive way, possibly because I don't particularly believe that the burden is on me as a blogger to be either diplomatic or constructive. Some of you, predictably, don't like my take on things, and I invite you to ignore me. Or, hell, make use of whatever you can glean from it, even if it's just the juice to go on doing what you've been doing. Some of you think I'm coming off as a pompous and self-regarding jerk, speaking only to his anointed peers in the triple-sekrit intellectual elite. I can't do anything about the first part of that, but the second part truly makes me very sad indeed. For my part, I'm going to keep on doing interaction design, in my rather stolid and workmanlike fashion, and I'm going to keep on writing and expressing the things I believe to be true. I like to think I'm a better writer than I am an interaction designer, but there are clearly those who wouldn't agree. Or would believe that I do neither particularly well. Or who couldn't care less. I can live with that, all of it. For those two or three of you who *did* get something out of the piece, I'm delighted. I imagine that you might share with me the sense, contra Dave above, that the history of urbanism is nothing but the history of human interaction with large-scale, dynamic, adaptive systems, with very obvious resonances with and implications for any body of endeavor calling itself "interaction design." I look forward to sharing insights with you and working together toward the improved human experience of systems like this, of whatever type and in whatever context we encounter them. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47932 ________________________________________________________________ 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
