At the core here is the conflict btw the tenure system and vocational education and the expectation by employers that all education have direct practical application.
To expand on this, another aspect of the gap has to do with design horizons and how R&D is viewed in many corners of professional and business practice (i.e., in "industry").
It is surely true that the tenure system and the gross over-emphasis on academic publication makes it harder for academics to be immediately relevant to the world around them. This holds for interaction design as well as for any other "applied" field of inquiry that I can think of.
But interaction design seems to have another quirk to it. Even in academia, you can find interaction design being practiced to create knowledge in the form of innovative interaction techniques and concepts. However, most of that work aims at expressing partial visions of a future, 3 or 5 or 10 years down the road.
What is called R&D in most companies I have seen is a lot of D and a little R in this sense, and tends to work with shorter timescales and more extrapolation from the current situation (market, uptake, technology, infrastructure, trends, ... you name it).
This makes academic "research" and industrial "R&D" less than compatible and professionals sometimes dismiss academic interaction design research as blue-sky.
Which in turn creates an employability/applicability problem for schools where academic research has an influence on the education curriculae. This translates to quite a few of the "new" interaction design schools drawing on university traditions rather than art school traditions, and competing for grants and recognition within academia -- where a great premium is put on integration between education and research.
Jonas Löwgren, academic Malmö University, Sweden ________________________________________________________________ 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
