–Engage

I was honored to be asked to write for IDSA‘s latest issue of Innovation. This issue’s executive sponsor was Alistair Hamilton who I had the honor to work with and was edited by Don Carr of the Syracuse Univ Industrial and Interaction Design Program. The issue focused on interactivity and interaction design. You do need to be a member to get the magazine which is only in print format.

I was asked to write about my experience helping to form IxDA. This article at first was a history of IxDA’s growth, but eventually turned into a discussion of the “design principle” that I still feels sets IxDA apart from other similar professional organizations.

IDSA has given me permission to post a PDF of the article here so that I can share it beyond the IDSA membership.

I look forward to people’s comments, but would request that people not comment here, but rather comment here: http://www.papercomment.com/ so that the entire IDSA and non-IDSA community can join in as well.

Designing a Down-Up Organization (pdf)

The Interaction Design Association of today is not the IxDG or even InteractionDesigners.com of yesteryear. The organization has grown faster than the rising stock of Apple over the the short 7 years since Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini made his call to action that gave conception to this organization. This is my way to say that many of you may not know who I am, so I’m going to start with a short background bit.

In 2003 I was named David Heller. I was a UI Designer working in the Bay Area. I was a nobody who heard a call and saw it as an opportunity and to be honest a calling. For 6 years I was involved in birthing the organization through creating its first global conference. This is to say that I have a lot at stake with how IxDA continues to go and that it continues to go at all. Any success one might attribute to my career since IxDA’s founding I feel is directly related to the IxDA community. I see my future success not dependent on its existence, but definitely would be greatly aided.

As noted above the discussion list I helped found with some 600 people is now a community of practice of some 25,000+ (depending on how you do the math) with influence well beyond those numbers due to the magic of social networks. That’s a lot of growing in a very short time for a purely, 100% volunteer organization with about a $50k budget (outside of the conf) to manage infrastructure and other overhead. This all without membership fees (though we’d be no where without member and corporate financial support).

Ok, enough background …

This past February IxDA released an entire new platform for running its virtual, global community of practice. I have had limited involvement in the project (mostly in the early periods) across its 2 years in existence. IxDA did fund raising specifically for this project at various points and even allocated a large part of their profits from the conference to this project so that we can hire a dedicated technical team. Design was almost completely done by volunteers on their own time/dime.

This was NOT an easy decision for IxDA because of some of the founding “unsaid” principles of the organization that have remained in tact. The overriding principle of leaders of IxDA has been that we want the community to create the community. This is something that has been a huge part of what makes IxDA special (not unique by itself, but a contributor).

The reaction to this amazing effort has been really negative and actually toxic by way too many. Not a majority, for sure, but enough people have felt it acceptable to speak to the amazing people of this community with condescension and vitriol. For the most part I have remained out of it. I have my own issues w/ the site, but my history in the organization and my respect for those that accomplished this huge task has led me to silence (except through the official public channel of getsatisfaction.com; as is appopriate for any member of the community).

The most recent lashing out has touched a nerve for sure. The comment that seems to get under my skin the most is how can an organization dedicated to IxD put out such a bad user experience? In spirit, I’d agree with this comment, but it said with disdain and without any accountability or sense of responsibility from those who are saying it. This goes to the heart of the issue through. Which is to say, if you are not going to put up then shut up. Well, that’s what I feel on first glance.

Then I have to remember something. I have to remember that my reaction is from a person who started a 600 person discussion list and NOT a 25k member community of practice. The leaders of IxDA have said that the organization is not about consuming services and so there are no customers (paraphrasing). This is another statement I would love to agree with. Alas, I think I am finding that this is no longer possible given our scale. We can’t assume that 25,000 people in any sort of critical mass will be able to add energy to the organization as much as before.

But if that is true it has other consequences. We can’t assume that a group of volunteers on their own time/dime will be able to provide the same level of service as a pay for model. It is just not feasible to the level of scale we have achieved given the goals and needs of the organization long term. So this leaves us with 2 options:

1. Patience or Energy: Either work within the system (take the time to learn what the system is to be polite to those who created it) and wait for these things to change. This means having good faith that the people behind doing stuff have the best intentions and good heart. Or jump in and HELP and don’t be such a douchebag as to go into a friend’s house and tell them the food is bad w/o even volunteering to do the dishes!

2. Show me money or show me attention: We change the model of the organization to one that is more financially focused so that the level of quality we all want to achieve is what we can afford as an organization. This can mean having dues, or levels of membership (free & not-free). This can mean adding advertising to the site (we already have an ad model in place for the conference and many local events).

Doing this latter idea though is a major cultural shift for the organization. Our approachability and bottom-up culture would be facing challenges (not insurmountable) that we may not be prepared to face, or that would change the very nature of the organization in ways that we are not ready to live with (maybe never).

The point of this post is to address the anger and hostility. It is to get people to think before they speak with such anger about something that in the end is well not life & death and not even something you pay for and in most cases support.

I’d like to see a broader conversation about IxDA’s future. I know the board is having these conversations every day (when I say I know, it means I know the people and I know they are smart and engaged. I have no direct insights). But maybe we as a broader community need to take this opportunity to engage in this conversation. Maybe we can bring back the long dead “working group” email list for people who are interested in this conversation.

I don’t have answers because I know I do not know all that is going on. What I do know is what I see and I don’t like what my community (I say mine the same way I would say about the area surrounding my home if a criminal came into my neighbors house and I would be defending that community) is shaping up to be and despite the amazing efforts of some amazing people I am noticing more slippage and it feels like we are falling down a slippery slope.

The board of IxDA and even the local leaders who build IxDA every day are only as good as the people who contribute to the community itself. So it is only right that we as contributing members take voice and engage!

It is often said that interaction design evolved out of the requirement to stem the tide of the ever increasing amount of complexity in our personal lives due to technology. Design & engineering a like had to encompass a personal/human view of the effects that inserting their creations would have on the people who would encounter them (directly or indirectly).

To do this type of work required the creation and assimilation of tools from all manner of the world of art, design & engineering. Basically, we created THE most complex hard to understand and do discipline and practice, to help others mitigate complications due to complexity (said wordily on purpose).

People today have been grappling with where does IxD end and where does service design begin. Hell if I know (or care). Just like I can’t tell you where [fit old design discipline here: Arch, ID, GD, etc.] ends and IxD begins and you shouldn’t care either. What I do know is that there is a new group of people who are creating a community–a vibrant and productive one–which isn’t even really all that new relative to our fast-paced world, that “knows” what service design is, why its important and how to do it. No self respecting IxD with half a sense of integrity could argue that they exist.

Today I was giving a lecture that I first wrote in 2005 about the “history of IxD”. It is all predicated on the sense that our discipline emerged b/c of the need of human consideration by those who were grappling with placing ever increasing complex technologies in the context of the aforementioned humans. Further, we juxtaposed this to the birth of other disciplines like interactive design/art and realized that we can’t do our jobs well without considering aesthetics and classical design disciplines are much better at that than us, so lets look to them for guidance.

Along the way though, we realized that there was much in the world outside of technology that was either already more complex than it had to be, or whose complexity existed outside the ream of technology itself, even if technology enabled that complexity to happen in the first place. Institutions like travel & hospitality, financial services, health services, even retail have become so complex that like the graphical interfaces of yore human beings are being left with the same feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Service designers had to emerge to tackle these issues using new tools and to come up with new frames (such as collaboration) in order to take that same spirit of human consideration that is so rooted in interaction design and apply it to new areas of complexity. Like metaphor was used to bridge the distance between system and mental models in technological systems, so too will new rhetorical devices and frames will be used towards bridging whatever it is that is lacking between the system and human being within services.

All this is to say that at least for myself (and maybe for you now) I now have an understanding of the context that helps me thinking about services better in comparison to my core skillsets, and allows me to engage services in a new way.

I’d be interested to hear what self-identified service designers are thinking in this regards and if this framing at all might help you speak to interaction and other designers understand what it is you do.

IxDA has been an honor for me to be a leader of since the very first moment I joined the Yahoo group August 2003. It has always been about learning. Whether it was learning about group building from Challis Hodge, speaking from Robert Reimann, teaching from Jared Spool, leading from Dirk Knemeyer, designing from way too many people to even imagine, IxDA has always been about putting myself in proximity to people I can learn from. Often as in the case I’m about to describe, the decision to lead was not purposefully about learning, but through design’s best tool, serendipity, it most certainly turned out that way.

A few months ago Bill DeRouchey, one of this year’s co-chairs, reminded me that I wanted to lead a Student Competition as part of IxDA’s Interaction 10 | Savannah conference coming up this February. It wasn’t so much that I had forgotten as I was actually hoping someone else would step up and take it over. I’m SOOO glad no one did.

I immediately sent out feelers to people I wanted to be on a jury. I sent some 15 invitations out and assumed that many would say, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy, but thanks for thinking of me.” What I got back were 14, “SURE!”. And more than that, I even got about 5 people at different times and for different pieces who were incredibly energized and worked really hard.

For each piece we’ve worked on, 1 person though has stood out to me as my mentor for the project. This just reminding me that the person with vision and leadership is not the smartest person in the room, but best capable of knowing who is and how to utilize them. Jonas Löwgren from Malmö University in Sweden has worked almost as tirelessly as I have. But more important than his work ethic has been his contribution to the content of the competition, and his availability to me as a reflecting board.

From Jonas, I have learned so much in this process so far, but I have to say the thing I have been trying to internalize with me the most is Jonas’ ability to synthesize and facilitate through criticism. As someone who comes from a more, let us say, direct culture, I have found that I have struggled the most at learning how to give criticism of students and peers in an approachable way.

I have noticed that Jonas’ discourse style even in his second language is one of synthesis and facilitation. What this manifests itself as is to be that person who restates with innate sensitivity what a group of people are trying to say. But it isn’t just restating, it is contextualizing and purposefully giving higher relevance to some points more than others. Then he reacts in a way which produces the “next logical step”. It is a brilliant teaching technique and one that I both appreciate as a teacher, but more importantly appreciate as a peer and student.

Of course, I have other more direct lessons through this process from all of the participants on the student competition jury and I appreciate every opportunity from all. Working closest with Jonas though has been a true pleasure and I wanted to give this public shout out.

To see what all this good leading & learning has led to, please feel free to go to http://interaction.ixda.org/student-competition and encourage all students to put themselves out there. Jonas, myself and the rest of the jury are some of the best educators and practitioners out there today and our feedback and review regardless of your likelihood of winning will be a source of review you will not have too many chances to receive.

It is so hard to not become a victim of our surroundings and this post is trying really hard to not do that.

I have a pretty multi-facetted history; however, that history has been linear in its movement away from technology and towards design. Not that these are opposites, but they have centers of overlapping communities. Each community with its own distinctiveness at its center. Language, methods, mental models, etc. And to be very blunt, my techy side was never really at the engineering level, and more at the social scientist level. Both though share a rationalistic and analytical tendency that allows them to speak more easily with each other like a Norwegian speaking with a Swede, as opposed to a Scandinavian speaking with a French person. This latter simile is more like that of a techie to a designer. Did you notice how the level of zoom changed? (important here).

As many have noted, I’m pretty passionate when I speak. This is a double-edged sword to say the least. I think passion helps you get listened to, but if the energy is not directly properly, it is often interpreted as being definitive instead of suggestive. Lately, there have been a lot of discussion (good discussion) about the relevance of “user-centered design”. Unfortunately, since no one really has a lock on what the heck UCD is, it is hard to have a conversation about it. Further, the idea that there are so many contexts for work makes it further difficult to come to any sort of group consensus about it. Further, people are in different parts of their career.

Some might say that this lack of cohesion of a single community of practice is at the core of the problem and it is hard to argue that. But that is plain cynical and I do believe there is more than binds all these differences than separates us.

Since we are trying to generalize, I will break this down to a common denominator. “user centered design” is the philosophy that we must in a measured and methodical way bring the user into various stages of the development process of products & services. The bold elements are there for a reason.  Measured is not necessarily quantitative, but it is declarative and can be related to the data of observation (in the (social) scientific sense of the term). Methodical is important because it relates to the intentionality of the observations and that they observations follow a method with a history, and a collection of case studies that support its use. This to me is the bare minimum in order to maintain that UCD is a useful, viable term for design.

User Experience is the result of any design artifact that uses UCD. It is NOT “experience design”, but an experience design can be a user experience. Further “user experience” implies by the use of the term user that the experience focuses on “use”. But that might push back the discussion a bit, so gloss over it if you felt the hair on your neck go up.

Now that we know what I’m saying when I say these terms we can move on. The reason I feel like these terms are still moot is because of history. It assumes that sometime in 1991 when Mitch Kapor first declared the software design manifesto or even further back when SIGCHI split from HFES or even further back when HFES formed that these were the first moments of UCD at all. We can look back to DaVinci and his work or we can look even further to the work of “de Architecture” by Vitruvius to see how human beings were being methodically considered in measured ways.

Even in modern times (turn of the century) the idea that we must design for humans has taken place well outside the realm of software design. Henry Dreyfus’ “Designing for Humans” is a core book of study for anyone doing Industrial Design, for example. And there are many more examples. So at best UCD is not describing something new, but describing something specific within a new area where it has been missing. Ok, that’s all well and good.

Today, though, we are designing in close collaboration with more and more types of people and the reality is that the language of UCD in practice and theory is couched in terms that while relevant to many looses relevancy for way too many.

So as someone who has declared that UX and UCD are dead, it is not out of insensitivity to the need that we constantly observe, measure, analyze and model, but rather out of a change of audience when I promote my thinking.

But to the contrary, Dave …

I just recently returned from the Industrial Design Society of America’s IDUS annual conference. There were more “design research” sessions than any other single topic by my best analysis. I didn’t attend many but one that really got me was one of the closing keynotes. It was a brilliant example of how we need to be engaged in observational and immersive research in order to get out of ourselves. What the speaker said is that “gut-based design is at best a derivative of conventions” and in order to leave convention we need new data.

At no time during his talk did this person once use UCD or any other language we would consider in our purview as UX practitioners. He was completely grounded in realm where anthropology and industrial design meet (quite often I might add).

But I hear so many people in software design whom UCD can’t be taken for granted and so many in the ID community for whom research is non-existent. This is why UCD/UX is still relevant for them. But for me, in my world, in my experience, UCD/UX ended about 5 years ago. Suggest to me that research is optional or disposable and I won’t take the job. If you insist that research is the core to great design, you’d equally loose my attention.

I teach research methods and I’m drilling into these students the idea 2 things:

1) you can’t start to design unless you know why and for whom

2) you can’t do research without designing it from the ground up

The dialectic between design and research is strong. You should never stop designing and you should never stop observing. Does observation always need to be methodical and measured? I don’t think so. It is more important to just get out of oneself and consider the world around you. There are contexts where observation has to be measured in order to be useful and the best forms of measured observation are methodical. But again, the goals and contexts will determine how and when.

So I declare that while AIGA has gone up high, have they done it at the expense of graphic design? I don’t know yet, as it hasn’t been long enough. Can a single organization represent meta-design and low level disciplines? It is a hard path that’s for sure! I don’t know if it is the right path for IDSA? Do they have no choice?

To be honest, I don’t know how we can do this? Should we concede to AIGA and remain focused on form? Do we need to just blow the whole thing up and start from scratch? What I know is that the industrial design point of view is both special and NOT unique. I know that other points of view are special and NOT unique. I know that design disciplines across all forms and behavior are converging, but I know that from an educator’s perspective that we cannot train all forms of design craft at the level of undergraduate cannot be done. I’m scared that if the organizations just keep lookin’ up that they will be doing a worse disservice to their respective disciplines.

What we need is organization cooperation. What we need is an education system that is more skillful, unified, collaborative, and cooperative across disciplines. What we need are graduate programs that focus on creation of new knowledge, explore form & aesthetics, and teach leadership & strategy. We need corporate practices that return to mentoring junior designers, that build relationships with a wide section of schools, and that contribute knowledge. Lastly, we need to acknowledge that more than degree-based formal training is needed to complete the needed education system for all of design.

So these are my thoughts post IDSA ’09 and in response to Jon Kolko’s own thoughts, euthanizing IDSA.

I’d love to hear from others.

I’m here at the IDSA (Industrial Design Society of America) National (or this year International) Conference. During my time here due to the very warm hearts of some of the colleagues I’ve met over the years, I’ve been included for the first time in some of the more … how shall I say this? … central group gatherings of the organization. As a point of background this is my 3rd IDSA National Conference and I’ve also been to 1 regional conference.

So why is this worthy of a blog article. Well, I had an epiphany the other night as I was doing some covert participatory observation research. The focus of my research was to gain insights into the formation and sustaining of a design professional organization for the purpose of discovering usable data points for my constant thinking about the organization that I helped formed and which is going through its own sustainability issues, Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

As I was looking on and participating in festivities among a crowd of the most devoted and hard working people of IDSA it really hit me.

Professional organizations are really just the evolution of peers discovering coalescence around a specific practice or interest and converting that, or growing that into a community of peers who then feel that they want to spread that “feeling” to a larger group of people in the form of a professional organization.

This is by no means a bad thing. It means you have a strong group of peers who are devotees to the “cause” of maintaining the quality and spirit of the original community. There are cautions, however. There can be a sense of defensiveness or exclusion on one side. The other side is that you may not really be able to maintain that core, or sustain it new peers’ energy because the initial group has not created enough of a compelling story to move beyond it’s initial intimacy-based roots.

So when I think about my organization, IxDA, I have a few thoughts:

1. Since we started out as almost an entirely virtual entity (except for small localized exceptions), we actually don’t have a single peer group driving the gravitational center of the organization in quite the same way.

This is both good and bad. It is good in that there is not really any sort of exclusion behavior, because what would we be excluding you from. I do know that there are people who do feel excluded from IxDA, but I don’t really understand where that comes from outside of excluding people who well do not practice interaction design.

The bad side as I see it is that lack of a coalesced center. We are non-defensive (well I am a little, but that’s just my nature) as a whole, and thus have a hard time saying “THIS! is who we are for any sustained period of time.

2. Our organization lacks age. We don’t have people who went through leadership cycles of college chapter > district work &/or local chapters &/or topic sections > national leadership who then became luminaries, thought leaders, “rock stars”, initiative leaders within the organization. (Not with any critical mass)

Why would Tog, Cooper, Buxton, Crampton-Smith, etc. take on any sort of leadership role within the organization? What I saw and continue to see here is luminary and veteran deep commitment to the organization.

Of course, one could say that well, we haven’t gotten there yet and that is fair, but I think there is something more. We don’t expect it. This past year at the Interaction 09 conference we only had ONE keynote speaker of 4 return to our conference from the previous year. (I understand in ’10 this may happen again, but with a different person). What struck me was that in ’09 this person had 2 qualities: 1. They were outside our target (which I love) as primarily an architecture professor (neither practicing nor focusing on IxD); 2. They were not speaking at all on their return visit to our (HIS) conference/community.  I’ll add a 3rd; his participation between conferences was not seen.

I remember being so happily surprised to see this person in ’09 in Vancouver. I really like Malcolm McCullough. I think he is brilliant and from an adjacent discipline has done more to define who we are than many inside our discipline. But that’s an aside. But I was also struck by the question, where are X, Y, Z people who are “leaders” of us all? This is not a condemnation in any way shape or form. Their support has been HUGE! and I know for one in particular it was not out of lack of desire.

But coming to the conference is very different from what I’m seeing here from 30-40 year veterans in IDSA/Industrial Design.They may not be officers, but they lead the conference, lead initiatives, support and mentor officers & district leaders, and devote themselves to the guidance and maturation of their organization (sometimes in heated ways).

I really feel that we need this. We tried to contrive this as an “Advisory Board” early in our formation, but as most contrivances, it failed. So I challenge us to figure out how to engage our most esteemed luminaries of our discipline so that they lead in more active ways. Right now, I don’t see why they would and I’d love to talk to any of “them” (sorry for the us v. them language, but I’m lacking the articulation of another way of saying this right now) and figure out what it is we need to do so that active participation is a valuable contribution to their lives and careers.

I also want to clarify that this isn’t about “luminaries” per se, and I apologize for using that semantics. But it is about the most senior among us. The execs among us who are giving tremendous leadership in their own organization without any “notoriety” at all.

3. An evolving but constrained vision for providing value to your constituents is the most important aspect of sustaining an organization. The channels change and one cannot merely engage them as a contrivance, but need to do so from a position of connectedness and thoroughness.

This is where IxDA excels. We are grassroots AND we are top down. We understand that the grass needs tending so to speak, but also know that it needs to breathe on its own. We understand that it is about building infrastructures that enable the grass to do on its own. We understand though that philosophically we need to maintain a consistent message across the local and the global.

My personal lesson here though is to not be too rigid. Find a broad enough vision and mission that isn’t more “inclusive”, but rather allows for the greatest evolution, yet maintain its accuracy. I’m not interested in including more views per se. For example, I’m not interested in broadening IxDA into a generic User Experience organization. If all you do is research & validation, or graphic design, or even industrial design (classical) then well there are other organizations and communities for that. I will bring you in so that my community is exposed to your areas as they are relevant to my own, but that is different from including you in my community. (Yes, I know a possibly controversial point.)

What I mean by being broad is to understand that for some Interaction Design means in their lives something much more narrow and specific in terms of technology & medium than it does to me. There is room for both, for sure, and quite honestly that broadness is increasing every year with inclusion of “behavior is medium” and service design as a medium that engages behavior.

I think that IxDA is in an amazing and exciting point in our young lives. Compared to IDSA we are but in childhood if not toddlerdom and we should maintain that context. We should be mindful of their flaws, and embrace their many successes. The stewardship of the current board has been beyond impressive and I will be sad to see some of them go this February. The leadership in particular of Janna Hick DeVylder (@jdevylder) has been the perfect transition from the entrepreneurial leadership like my own, to sustainable leadership. The Board is asking all the right questions for creating a NEW type of professional organization and seems to be avoiding so many of the pitfalls we can so easily fall into.

This organization was started by a “Call to Arms” by Bruce Tognazinni. Our discipline is filled with many “elder statespeople” like Bill Moggridge, Bill Verplank, Bill Buxton, Alan Cooper, Brenda Laurel, Gillian Crampton-Smith, and many more. I would love as part of the this work mentioned above we find a way to bring them home, instead of inviting them as guests. We need our elders, not just to teach us, but to model for us the very meaning of the work we hope to understand.

I think I just had an idea about how I might proactively start to do this! More soon!

I knew that a cathartic blog entry would lead to something good. Always great to find NEW moments of serendipity.

I first saw that there was a new issue of interactions (the magazine of ACM/SIGCHI) when @jkolko announced it. Right away I clicked on over to the site enticed by the mention of a piece about Education in NYC. Ya see I know big things are happening in NYC with the new SVA MFA in Interaction Design (@svaixd) chaired by @bobulate with co-leadership by an amazing designer, thinker and educator Stephen Heller.

When I arrived at the site, I was dismayed to find that a large portion of the articles were held for ransom by ACM, including the one I wanted to read. “Oh well!” I thought. I guess I’ll try to hit up a friend who is an ACM member or drag my ass down to the Jen Library (“Oh! I work for a university that buys magazines!!!”) here at SCAD (@scaddotedu) [Yes, it is sad that someone got @scad. Poaching Twitter IDs seems to be the new big game.]

In the meantime I was saddled with reading the abstract. I’m going to quote it here:

New York City has long ranked as one of the world’s design capitals, but the city’s interaction design community has been slow to find its feet here. Historically, user interface designers first flourished in the cubicle farms of the Bay Area, while many industrial designers plied their trade in the product foundries of the Midwest. Meanwhile, Manhattan designers traditionally worked in the city’s dominant media and advertising industries, with their inevitable bias toward print and motion graphics.
From “Old School, New School: Teaching Interaction Design In Manhattan” by Alex Wright in interactions XVI.5 – September / October, 2009

I have to admit that that abstract set me off already, and so I knew I wasn’t going to make it the Library I queried every other day or so a Tweeter friend of mine or another person urgently wanting to read this piece. But what got my underwear so tightly pulled up my butt in a wedgie anyway?

1. IxDA NYC has been around for 1/2 a decade and now represents a few hundred practitioners in NYC. So to say that IxD has been slow to find its feet feels really off to me. I will say that we are a pittance of the AIGA and IDSA community in NYC. But the way this piece comes across it really isn’t fair. To compare any digital profession to critical mass of Silicon Valley is sorta absurd.
2. His history of NYC new media and UI Design is WAY off. It is totally biased in his experience and not representative of a whole swath of designers who have been working in and about NYC as UI Designers, IAs, and UX Designers for the better part of 15yrs. I could go on and on here about the amazing startup culture of NYC, the financial industry tech sector spurned on by our famous now mayor, the Silicon Alley community that rose in the late 90′s.
3. Oy! I just hate when people change terms just so they aren’t being redundant, just to further confuse people. No UI Design is not the same as Interaction Design.

So, I persevered until I could get my hands on the article itself. Didn’t want to judge the book by the cover. Finally from 3000 miles away (depending on where my well-traveled friend @steveportigal is this week) I got it via scan of the physical copy in my inbox on my iPhone. I read it right away. I mean its only 4 pages so it didn’t take that long.

Some 3-5 hours later, this poured from my twitter stream (be sure to start from the bottom):

My twitter stream using Tweetie on my Mac

So about an hour later, I am here writing this for you all. I feel like there are a lot of holes in my short pokes and so it does neither myself nor Alex any good to just leave that lying there. So here is what I’m trying to get at. …

Since most won’t be able to read the piece, here is my very biased summary.

• really bad description of Interaction & UI Design in NYC (as seen above)
• A short bit about how design education has to juggle several sometimes conflicting priorities.
• Then jumping in to the SVA program he explains how they ere on the side of pragmatism while being SVA respecting creative freedom. He also mentions that all of SVA’s professors are industry peeps and explains the advantage to that as having a deep connection to reality (I can’t disagree) but he doesn’t then describe the criticism to that, and how most respected design schools try to maintain a mix of lifer educators and adjunct industry professionals. (No space here to explain why being a lifer is important.)
• Contrasts the SVA program to the long standing NYU ITP program, which is renounce for its creative explorations in areas of interactive telecommunications since well forever. And rightly explains that despite their ardent stance to maintain this philosophy their students end up in positions of leadership all over the world in digital environments of all types.
• Then there is a brief bit about Parsons
• Finally a piece about Pratt’s merging of visual design & library science.

And now that we are all caught up … here we go.

I’m actually going to start at the end, because it is the ending with the Pratt program that probably still has me so fired up. A visual design + LS program is not the same as an IxD program. It’s not. Yes, there will be some overlap classes, but beyond philosphy the goals, methods and overall practice is like saying that becoming a chiropractor is like going to med school. “Well they both learn anatomy, right?”

And this is the start of my problem with this piece. (and my problem with much of the UX community in general). Alex, whom I know is very well educated in IA and IxD and has a tremendous vitae to show he knows how to do it all, isn’t being careful. At best we can forgive the lack of fidelity or accuracy because the User Experience community has been too lenient and given us all way too much space to do the equivalent of saying a tree is the same as the forest it lives in (or visa versa).

I was a bit bummed about this b/c a) he didn’t acknowledge that Pratt’s been in the LS game for quite some time; b) the HUGE real missed opportunity at Pratt which is to have an ID/IxD program; c) calling that LS/VD program even slightly the same as ITP, Parsons or SVA a HUGE stretch. iSchool is NOT IxD School. Overlap is not the same as equation. If that is the case then NYU has another program in multimedia and another in HCI. Then there is Columbia’s HCI program, and actually SVA has had a computer arts program for the longest time. And FIT has an interactive design program as well.

But let’s go back to my rant on Twitter. In it I compare NYU/ITP to the Royal College of Art (in London) Designing Interactions program. I claim that here is a meaty comparison to explore. Both are very committed to allowing for creative freedom. However, every canvas has some implied boundary, and every institution has more than in implied philosophy.

NYU/ITP is an amazing program. I am not here to dismiss or discredit the amazing education and I’d even say research in the area of digital art & design that has and continues to take place there. But I know too many who have taken my previous attempts at defining out of “my” sandbox to mean that they don’t have my respect and that is just not true. If I correct you and say that your puppy is a lab instead of a golden retriever, it doesn’t mean there is a change in value or appreciation. Just an understanding of its properties in relationship to other puppies. Same here.

Now, ITP and RCA as noted are both what I would called schools that promote expression and exploration over pragmaticism and direct business practice. But they also differ greatly on what it is they explore. ITP’s focus (not exclusion, but focus) is on the medium. What is “interactivity”; how do we create it; what in the form makes something interactive? It is a class in art & expressionist design; Truly a fine art degree. RCA’s focus is on interactions. These for one are not limited to the digital (and thus interactive) but can include human to human interactions. When we talk about interactions vs. interactivity, what we are distinguishing is which side of the relationship are we going to look at. Study and exploration in interactions is a study in humanities and social science (the other one in art & engineering).

It is THIS dichotomy and by which I mean continuum, that is so much more important than expression vs. practicality. The latter is the personal pre-disposition of the teacher & student. The former is a philosophical debate on where “the answer” lies and what is the meaning and definition of interaction design.

This is why I am upset with Alex’s piece, b/c it so wildly and broadly paints the IxD stroke of paint, that it falls apart due to its lack of inclusion of the many other programs that would have to fit in that same stroke. Further in a magazine like interactions I would have expected something better, stronger and more targeted. Alex’s piece belonged in his own publication the New York Times or Crains (the local business weekly), but not in interactions.

Of course, it begs further the question, why in a magazine who’s chief subscriber based is NOT in the design & art school arena would someone write an article that solely focuses on that arena? Further, how can we talk about these institutions as being educators of IxD and not compare them to more academic and pure HCI programs who also claim to teach this? Lastly, why NYC in an international magazine? Talking about IxD education “styles” so to speak, and not talk about Europe (RCA, CIID, Umea, Malmo, Delft, Einhoven, Utrecht, Pottsdamn, Domus, etc.[and there are many many more]) is to not understand the real depth of IxD EDU.

So yes, as someone deeply engaged in IxD EDU here at SCAD (undergrad only), but with an Interactive Design program that is quite different (but amazing in its own right) just across the street I found this piece to be more an excuse to mention a new program in NYC but to find a way to fairly place it in a greater context, than to really explore the dynamics of IxD EDU.

(I started this post over 3 months ago and finished it today. Sorry if it feels a tad disjointed, but I still like it. Hopefully you will gain some inspiration and motivation by it.)

In 2008 I had the pleasure of co-chairing the first Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction 08 | Savannah. My partner in crime, Dan Saffer, provided a tapestry weaved through his vision of what would make a great program for the interaction design community, and I had a shared vision of what the conference experience should/needs to be.

There were many success criteria that anyone sets for themselves but the overwhelming response (and associated almost 200 person waiting list) of Interaction 08 were the pre-success factors that led to more important ones later, such as rave reviews and well the number of returnees to this year’s, now 2nd annual, conference, Interaction 09 | Vancouver.

The new chairperson, Greg Petroff, under new constraints led a tremendous team of volunteers to create an even better event than its predecessor. Greg, followed much of the same parameters of programming that Dan set up, with is own unique twists, and he had a different city with different challenges & opportunities that he was able to use to his advantage to create a great total experience.

As the logistician, in my organizing of the 1st conference, I was convinced that the logistics made the event, and I was totally wrong. They frame the event, but they don’t make the event. What makes the event are the people. Hands down, this year had an energy and a sense of community that last year did not. The critical mass of Twitter & Facebook had an undeniable effect on how people not only communicated, but also related to one another before, during and now even afterwards.

People talk about the “summer camp” atmosphere of the conference, but not in a bad cliquy way. Why? Because anyone and everyone can have instant entre into the world of the camp itself. There is an almost zero barrier to entering the world of Twitter and following being such a passive act with little obtrusion to those you are following, means you can connect anonymously and assert yourself on your own terms.

But the conference was not Twitter by any means. The other piece that people brought into the conference is their voice. The voice of the conference was everywhere. The true desire to use our skills and talents towards improving the human condition was infused throughout the conference. This wasn’t by design, except to say the design was to let the natural voice of the community find itself. It came through the organic conversation between speakers and attendees and sometimes between speaker and speaker.

Being at the center of it all, I often wonder if I’m just kidding myself. Is this feeling just for me? Did all 450 or so people at the Four Seasons & Fairmont in Vancouver have any semblance of the same experience? (Please let me know if you didn’t.) I am constantly challenging this, so I don’t get too myopic in my world view.

What I hear though is that many, and I would argue most of the people I met (many of whom for the 1st time physically or virtually) had some level of contentment and connection to what was created in this gathering.

But back to the voices and what they were saying and how they were saying it. Despite the many technical difficulties the one recurring thought I have when I think about this year versus last year is that we all from keynote to lightning round speaker to hallway conversationalist matured. Our tones, our topics, our means of connecting with one another have all gotten more professional, more intelligent, more thoughtful, and more human.

The other piece of the conference that was there for me, was a sense of positivism. Not necessarily optimism, but positivism. What’s the difference? Well to me, one can still have a sense of the negative nature of the world we live in, but still feel as though they can have a positive effect towards changing it. Obviously, the sustainability folks (talked about on many other forums) have put out their call to arms to help save the world, but Dan Saffer & Kim Goodwin put out in my mind an equally important call to arms–BE DESIGNERS!

Dan Saffer’s presentation did a great job of invigorating the audience about what is at the core of what we DO and to get out there and just DO IT! Kim’s was more reflective and urged us to understand the connections between us as people/practioners as human beings, and to take on the challenges of our practice, especially the one of education.

As the next Interaction conference looms, back to Savannah, where I now call home and hosted by the Savannah College of Art & Design, which I now call employer, I see something even more new beginning to grow. A next step for the interaction design community and the user experience community as a whole.

1. The frame we are creating for Interaction 10 | Savannah is going to be completely different. The new co-chairs, Bill Derouchey and Jennifer Bove (@billder & @jlb), have been listening, but also exploring the possibilities of what we haven’t thought of before. They are designing with the help of a great team a new type of conference. One that the UX community has not seen before.

2. SCAD is working harder to make sure the logistics are even that much better than before. We have more venues (none are hotels, except for the pre-conf workshops) that really bring out the spirit of both SCAD and historical Savannah. Two venues date back to the 1700′s.

3. But this isn’t about history, but more about inspiration. This event will have new voices emerge (or old voices using new tones) that include student contests, interactive art exhibition and film documentaries.

4. Don’t just listen, but get active, engage, do. The pre-conferences aren’t going to be the only place to engage in dialog, or work with your hands. There will be inspirational talking heads, but there will also be discussions and activities to participate in both days of the conference.

There are a few things from the ’08 conference to continue to look forward to. Odds are the weather will be better than Vancouver (we have a 67% chance of better than north of Dixie weather in Feb in Savannah). And most importantly we are planning on bringing back our old caterer for a couple of the parties. Our event at Interaction 08 | Savannah won our caterer accolades in the press all around the Southeast. So she’ll be coming back.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, there is the most important thing again–the voices. There is no better voice to bring to Interaction 10 | Savannah than your own. So bring it. Make a submission of the various types of presentation and leading opportunities and rise up in chorus with the many others who will be presenting and leading this coming February.

I’d love it if peeps would leave a comment if they have even the slightest inkling that they’d like to lead something at Interaction 10 | Savannah. But more importantly go to http://interaction.ixda.org/ and submit your abstract(s) for consideration.

See ya there! (I mean here! I live here now!)

For some reason I’m feeling pensive about the first part of this year. It is not quie half way over yet, but for me the entire year feels done. OH! I’m now in education. (I always avoid the use of the term academia, b/c that is not what I do. I teach for a living.)

My year started with a bang in Savannah. I was thrown in front of some of the most passionate group of designers I couldn’t have even hoped to be teaching. They were/are for the most part a brilliant bunch. They were energized, eager, critical, passionate, creative, and professional. The energy they gave me, I only hope I was able to give them back.

The year also started very awkward–new city, new job, new craft, new peers. I was so off-balance and in many ways part of my pensiveness is because I still feel pretty wobbly coming off the recent end of my spring quarter.

After just a month into this crazy year, I went off to Vancouver energized by students (did it show?) and ready to show them off, and show of some of my recent thinking about IxD pedogogy. It was fun to be at Interaction 09 | Vancouver but also hard.

IxDA is my baby. While it seems arrogant to say this out loud through 2003-2008 no single individual put more energy into the nurturing of IxDA than I did. So I feel justified in feeling a tad clingy about the organization and well somewhat annoyingly controlling. Thank G-d! the current president and I get to spend time on the beach chatting about stuff from time to time. But seriously, Interaction 09 was hard because it opitimized for me the growing rift in our discipline and possibly the soon to be future demise of our practice as anything valuably distinguishable.

The rift(s) that exist in our community seem to be those that are culturally trained in “The Valley” and those that are not. Now that culture has much more infuence than the geographic label might express. It is really about the analytical vs. the visceral sides of our communities. But it is also about those who see their task as firmly focused on a single medium and those who see their craft as being informed or nurtured within that medium, but estensible to a fairly wide range of problem areas and communication mediums.

I believe deeply in the discipline of interaction design. Robert Fabricant put it best that “behavior is our medium” and not “computing technology” but our practices are say so complex that no one can see the discipline from the practice any longer. I know I struggle in my semanicly aware mind my ability to maintain a separation between IxD as practice vs. IxD discipline, but I believe strongly whereas our practice needs to dissolve into our chosen mediums of practice, our discipline requires even more scrutiny, growth, and distinction than ever.

Yes, I truly believe that the form-giving practices truly own interaction design. Our role as mediary between the system and the “designer” is fading and over the next 5-10 years, I feel titles like IxD, UX, IA, etc. except for some proud specialists or educators is just going to fade. Interactive Design, Industrial/Product Design, Visual/Graphic Design, & Architecture all own too large of a piece of the design of behaviors already & historically and can easily learn how to augment their current practices with IxD.

My undergraduate students who minor in IxD are doing the right thing. They first and foremost engage in learning the craft of Industrial Design, and hen second the methods of medium independent design, or just plain problem solving. The great ones who take the minor seriously are best prepared to be the designers tha all organizationd need today: deep analytical thinking, problem solving and high stamina creativity across a bredth of design discplines–usually ID, GD and IxD.

Therefore, I am growingly believing that a graduate degre in interaction design that is “vocational” in its goal is missing the point. There really shouldn’t be “interaction designers”. there should just be designers who get interaction design. Graduate education then should be focused on exploring the limits, philosophy, ideals and aesthetis that is interaction design. I lean further and further away from programs like CMU and closer to programs like CIID and RCA. You should come to the masters degree already with the ability of holding down and promoting your way through your career. You should leave the masters program only after contributing to the dicourse of a great and grand discipline, and doing so with beautiful craft in at least one form-giving design discpline–e.g. ID, GD, Interactive/Software.

Well, that’s where I’m landing right now. I know many might not agree, but for my sense, this is the big enchilada.

So finally after 3 months of waiting the next large chunk of vids are up on line via Library.IxDA.org.

My faves include:

ME! – Foundations of Interaction Design

Jared Spool & Friends: Hiring the next generation of interaction designers

(at around the 46min mark you can see me causing a ruckus during Q&A. It’s real fun!)

I have had this idea in one shape or another for a few weeks now. It all started during the days of the heavy debates on the IAI and IxDA lists about the nature of our communities and the relevance if any to the term UX for me in particular and our total practice more generally. Where I landed is a very unstable place, but a place that has been getting constant shoring up by peers and circumstance.

I’ll just put on the plate the BIG DEAL.

Technology as a focus of attention of “design” is over.

What I mean by this is a lot broader interpretation of technology than meer computers and networks, but any medium: print, audio, structures, etc. One might even interpret “technology” to be “medium”. A strong statement, eh?

I believe that the Digital Age of the last period which is really the “Information Age” if not over, is waning. Wow! that’s a statement. As social networks are exploding and the application of technology to new situation seems endless, how can one make such a statement?

I am coming from 3 places:

1. Not that technology can’t do great things.
2. However, focusing on technology or medium’s will never lead to great solutions
3. More will be done by applying existing technologies in new ways, or by transforming ourselves around existing technologies then any change created by wholly new technologies.

Some might think that I’m restating Robert Fabricant’s thesis from the Interaction 09 | Vancouver keynote he made where he made 2 bold statements:

Interaction Design is not about technology

The medium of Interaction Design is Behavior

But, in this half-baked blog post, I’m positing something more. I’m saying that “medium focused” design is flawed. That any design practice that defines itself first and foremost from its medium will always start in some way from the position of “what?” while in this day in age, the most important first question for designers should always be “why?”.

Are you asking “why?”

This notion also flies in the face of those who call themselves user centered designers who probably would say the first question would be “who?” I counter this charge on 2 levels. In this day and age where transformation against the “will” of the user is one of the primary missions of design’s largest challenges, “who” and “for whom” and even “why whom?” (motivations & goals) is secondary to the more dire goals of the planet, and society.

But putting that aside for a moment It is important to realize that there is something big going on. Industrial Design is changing. A design discipline who’s focus was on 3D form is now becoming THE design discipline focused on “why?”. It is the one next to IxD that is moving the Service Design, Sustainability, and Design Thinking elements in the design community more than anyone (just my opinion, but I’m stickin’ w/ it). It understands that “why?” is the only way to move these concerns forward. It’s not that there aren’t elements in other design disciplines taking on “why?” but I would argue with less vigor and total commitment. From IDSA, to Core77, to IDEO, frog design, etc. the very heart of ID practice and organization is focussing itself on issues of “why?”

Before this realization of mine, I was convinced that only IxD really dealt with designing for “why?” but even then too many of my co-practitioners are still way too interested in designing “what?” for “who?” But at the core of IxD is still the greatest message of “why?” I have seen in a single design discipline (if not practice).

At this point, this may be a bit disjointed, but I’m convinced more than ever that only through cross-disciplinary teams can “why?” ever truly be answered appropriately or well. Our pre-dispositions spoil us. We need to have reflection from other positions. Self-reflection is a trap, that is just a feedback loop. In the world of design this cuts in 2 different directions:

Verticals: Those who’s origins if not current practice focused on a specific medium. Graphic Design, Architecture, Industrial Design, Interactive Design, Fashion Design, etc.

Horizontals: Those disciplines that transcend all mediums and have been sussed out through the advent of networked computational technologies (that isn’t to say they are limited by it, but they were born from it). Information Architecture & Interaction Design

It is important that there are people strong in verticals. These people are necessary to be the craftspeople who can carve out the prototypes to model the solutions of tomorrow. It is equally important to have people strong in the horizontals who can guide the questions that are beyond mediums and answer the real questions of developing problem statements outside of technology and embedded in people.

So there are 2 parts of this half-baked thesis (Damn! I wish I had some 1/2 baked Ben & Jerry’s).

1. We are in an inter-technology period where our biggest changes are going to come by applying existing technologies towards the goal of changing our organization: transformation
2. Because of #1, we need to re-think the ways that design disciplines are organized both in academia and in practice.

It is this 2nd point that I’d like to tackle next:

I’d like to propose that all design schools change their organization (including my own). Due to the pervasiveness of technology, the tools and the solutions have led to a universal truism. No discipline of art or design is devoid of computational, networked technology. Ergo, having programs that focus on technology is meaningless for a design school. Technology should be considered foundational as much as color theory or art history to these programs. But also equally foundational is how to teach students to design from the “why?” Then, they can work on gaining practice in medium’s craft at higher levels.

I’d like to suggest 2 years of foundation where students learn traditional foundation, but then learn a new foundation:

1. Research Methods: ethnography, evaluation, etc.
2. Social Sciences: Sociology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Anthropology
3. Business: Finance, Marketing
4. Creative thinking
5. Horizontal design: IA & IxD
6. 3 Verticals: (Intros): Product, Communications, Interactive, Architecture

Then the next 3 years (yes, 3 years) of undergraduate education are a collection of studios that help a student either focus deeply on 1 vertical, or combine 2 to a level of relevant competency all the while applying horizontal design disciplines in either case.

Ok, this is as far as I can take this for now. I’m sorry for the hob-gobblin of ideas, but if I didn’t get this out of my head, I’d explode. Your help, insights, criticisms, etc. in helping me suss this out, would be appreciated. Be gentle though.

I’ll let the video stand on its own! I’m so excited that this talk came to the web finally.

NYC IxDA – Dave Malouf – The State of Interaction Design from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

This is my response to Andrew Hinton’s recent blog post. I was going to post it as a comment, but it really is MY thinking and it is rich enough that I feel it belongs here. Sorry Andrew, my experience is really changing my framing of who “we” are and whether or not there is a “we” at all.

So here’s how it came out of me!

What I said at IxD09 is what I’ll say now. The context of the conversation cannot be generalized. Talking generally about UX is an exercise in futility. The “umbrella” is made up as a social convention that I’m growingly starting to believe does not serve anyone at all. It is a crutch that we’ve created to hide from truths, and continue misinformation about what is we really do. We have allowed the origin of our communities to define, the terms we use regardless of their validity and then used the community as the basis to expand those definitions beyond utility.

A post like this is trying to solve the wrong problem. Andrew is a natural peacemaker, but I’m not sure you are asking the right questions, and I’m not sure you are serving the community that you feel closest to.

There is so much that separates IA/IxD/Usability/HCI/Graphic Design/Industrial Design, etc.

To this end, I don’t see the tent. If you look at the trends in education, and outside the web world of design, the very concept of UX is a blip on their radar. This reality alone challenges the notion of the tribe.

Now, let’s be clear. Separation is not the same as devaluing, or degrading. It is about creating clarity, which in turn will clarify so many different things that still in the UX world remain unnecessarily confused:
1) How do we get educated?
2) What is our career path?
3) What are the right methods of practice?

The reality is that once you move OUT of the web there is so much more that separates IA from IxD than keeps them together. Just look at the work from CIID & RCA/DI and compare to the work of any US IA program.

I find this chumbaya repetition to simply be counter productive at this time in our history. Revel in our differences, and lets stop denying them, couching them in friendlier terms, or otherwise try to make us just get along.

I said this to Louis Rosenfeld and I mean it today even more than then (during #ixd09). Different is not a value, just a description. It is not divisive, and does not mean that collaboration and cooperation cannot happen. A civil engineer and an architect are not the same thing, nor is a cariologist and a neurologist, or a carpenter and a cabinet maker.

Interaction Design is NOT Information Architecture. Stop the madness of trying to be everything to everyone!!

Today, the IxDA makes a radical change in how we are defining “community”. I’m proud to help announce the IxDA’s new site (in beta release).

For me this is a beginning on many levels:

• A new way of having a multi-faceted community contributed conversation.
• A new way of thinking about an organization

The former idea will be obvious to anyone going to the new site. The new functionality and how it is integrated well with the existing email forum is just great–just the beginning, but also great as is.

My favorite features center around the ability to tag but also to create favorites around threads and postings. But also the ability to create a profile. Further, I love the RSS features. You can get the whole feed, a topic feed, and some others.

Now the idea that I really love about the beta site is that it is the best demonstration of how the board feels IxDA should work. Someone outside the leadership of IxDA, just did this. Jeff Howard on his own b/c he was fed up with the limitations of the email list, but loved its content, decided to build a system just like this. The board in turn said GREAT! Well, let’s take your idea, and your energy, add a bit more fuel to it w/ some more help and voila! we have a new initiative for IxDA.

So if you have an initiative for IxDA that you want to see happen. Just do it!

Anyway, I’m very excited about the beta site and can’t wait to see people using it.

A now almost 60 message thread is going on within the IAI Members list. It seems that trying to be witty led to a long bashing of myself over and over again, b/c G-d forbid I care about the advancement and growth of UX, IA and IxD. Below is an inspired retort

Some posts the following:

First I say:

What is so wrong with saying, “my gravitational center comes from X and that means.”

Then this person says:

Nothing. What rankles is saying to someone else on a list “you are incorrectly describing your gravitational center – use my schema instead.” (or the more passive but similar “why do you identify yourself thusly when you really should do it this other way”).

[... snip ... ]

I think a core value of mine at least is to respect how other people choose to identify themselves. I may personally describe them or what they do differently but I do not try to convince them to adopt my frame.

My reply to this now.

Bravo, but what does that get you? Does that advance a discipline or practice, or just make you feel good at night? Seriously. Sure, I know if I started calling myself a Duck Designer, it really doesn’t impact the lot of you. But when I start saying that Duck Design is Information Architecture & well usability and HCI and IxD, and create a community and organization to start promoting Duck Design as the latest and greatest thing b/c I have a new blog, book, and conference to support my ideas and my friends like them too, and I have a big consultancy that has sold it to X Fortune 1000 and latest darling startups, then yes, it does start to effect what I do and how I start to re-align my own identity and values. What’s worse, when Duck Design actually doesn’t do EVERYTHING that IA does, nor with the same methods and protocols, or theories of understanding, but still subsumes the language making it harder for me to continue to communicate to my existing clients/users/stakeholders, then it impacts me even further. Let’s not even get into the whole hiring and education issues that are involved here.

While as one person puts it that he just doesn’t really good work and continues to just do really good work, so what does all this matter I would then say, “who comes after you?” “How do you sustain and build?” “How do you communicate to your stakeholders who are reading contradictory spins on what you do in BusinessWeek?” Etc. Etc.

I find the lack of concern by the general UX community, not only IA or IxD to be very disheartening, as I do feel connected to this community IA and UX more generally, but I am seeing that more people are learning from what we’ve been offering and making it their own, and doing a better job of it. I see the design community (AIGA & IDSA) especially taking UX terms and practices and employing them as if they were always in their arsenal.

(Editor’s note: AIGA and IDSA while design orgs who’s practitioners do UX design in many ways, are not as organizations particularly philosophically connected to the User Experience community.)

I say more power to THEM. But it speak poorly on us. After 10 years of being around many of us still have not figured out how to grow the discipline. We’ve only figured out how to grow our INDIVIDUAL practices and the different disciplines we employ in those practices. This short sightedness is what I’m concerned about.

Does this ONLY come down to titles and formalized vocabularies? Nope, but it doesn’t hurt to start with the easy stuff, that’s for sure, and this is just plum easy.

Today the treasurer of IxDA, Greg Petreoff, had the honor of announcing our new pledge drive to make some dough before the end of year to support IxDA’s project donahue initiative.

Project Donahue is exciting because for the first time in the UX community an organization is putting its resources behind inventing its own virtual community software, transforming the traditional discussion list into a true knowledge center where people can contribute and consume as always, but also curate, to aid future consumption. See the presentation below to learn more. And go to http://ixda.org/ to donate money to help with this cause, and the other initiatives that IxDA is up to including local events, conference events like the IA Summit pre-conference IxD symposium and others to come.

Again, see the presentation below to learn more about Project Donahue:

I have been working hard for over 2 years to create a new organization dedicated to the advancement of both interaction design (IxD) and interaction designers. It’s now REAL. Go to http://ixda.org/ to learn more.

What is also very exciting to me is that I’ll be working with some great people. My fellow officers (I’m VP) are Robert Reimann as President, Greg Petroff as Tresurer, and Lada Gorlenko as Secretary. The rest of the board of directors are: Mauro Cavelleti, Josh Seiden, Lisa deBettencourt, Carrie Ritch, Luke Wroblewski, Micah Alpern, Frank Ramirez, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Kevin Narey, Dan Saffer.

In the “more” section of this entry, I’ve added the complete press release.

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I just wanted to link to this very clear and well articulated article about the history of web product design and why now more than ever IxD needs to be brought to the forefront of product design.

Content is King No More: Web 2.0 Is About Interaction by Dirk Knemeyer, Principal @ Involution Studios.

The Interaction Design Group (IxDG) announced that it will become a formal not-for-profit organization and explains its new purpose and strategy for achieving it.

I have been helping IxDG grow for close to 2 solid years now, and am very proud that a group of 14 energized, intelligent, talented, and passionate designers have gotten together to commit to bring IxDG alive. Below is the announcement that the new steering committee, of which I’m proud to be a continuing member of, sent out to the IxDG community.

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