When/Where/How did you decide to be a designer?

Brian Hoffman wrote in another thread: "While many of you have followed a very straight career path into interaction design, I'm probably not alone here in having come into this field along a more winding path."

I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

I fell off the engineering centric wagon in 1996 when I was writing code for a chip that made the LEDs flash on the front of a 10/100 ethernet hub, i.e. the 'interface'. I had to solve a number of technical issues translating the large array of information inside the chip in to the limited abilities of the LEDs . In looking around for tools/thinking to correctly solve these problems I chose some UCD principles. A couple of months later I used the similar principles to discovered a major usability bug and had a product placed on ship hold. From there on out I was responsible for advocating the user.

regards -pauric

I have always had an interest in computers... since I was a child. One of my early freelance clients was the publisher of an HCI abstract series in the late 80's early 90's. I thought hmm, 'mixing graphics and computers... cool'. While those projects were few and far between in the midwest, when the web hit a few years later we (co-workers and I) were all over it.

Mark

On Tuesday, December 18, 2007, at 03:36PM, "pauric" pauric at pauric.net wrote: I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

It was basically from 2 parallel paths: one from my interest in art and another from my interest in computing. Those paths met some day after thinking that art in itself was not what I really wanted and after investigating about Human-Computer Interfaces...

I searched and come up with Tog's "we have only ourselves to blame (for the lack of knowledge about interaction design)". Then I decided to start studying (product) design (for computing).

However after I started meditating frequently about 2 hours; I'm about to start a new path that I don't know were it leads... probably some form of computing or design related job plus a lot of meditation.

The Interaction Design studies that I've searched worldwide are either non-existant or prohibitively expensive. And I'm aware of Return of Investment... with the %u20AC$ that cost a career it may be a better investment to start a computer company (starting "small" with case design and production for example)... but I've not decided my future...

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On 12/18/07, pauric pauric at pauric.net wrote: I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

Fun thread I remember that moment for me very clearly.

I was in college studying technical writing and fully expecting to graduate, move to the Bay Area, and write technical manuals for Adobe when it happened.

I was programming a sound on my newly acquired (this was 1997 or 8) Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer when I noticed that the pitch fine tune parameter was a lot different than I was used to seeing it. On most digital (or analog/digital hybrid) synthesizers (of that time and before, anyway), sound parameters could be set at a value between 0 and 127. This is *completely arbitrary* and is an artifact of MIDI, a language that lets electronic musical instruments tell one another what to do. MIDI is a 7-bit language. Seven bits can only represent 128 distinct values, so musicians were stuck with setting things up how the machines needed them to be... not how they needed them to be.

What was different about the K2000 was that the pitch fine tune parameter was in cents, an actual unit of pitch and something that many musicians and most sound designers would understand. It hit me that someone took the time to adapt the machine to the musician rather than being lazy and doing it the other way round. And then it hit me that I wanted to be one of those people who took the time to figure that stuff out and design for it... I wanted to design user interfaces! Ideally, I wanted to design synthesizer user interfaces, but I haven't gotten the opportunity to do that yet, but designing for the Web has been highly entertaining.

I switched the focus of my major to UI design, took some different courses, and grabbed a very timely opportunity to help set up a usability lab for the university's Web development team. From that moment, I have never looked back...

F.

Hi everyone, I'm brand new to the list. What a great question for introducing myself!

I was in art school in the late 90's, but frustrated with the lack of web training. I sent my resume out, mostly in jest, and got leads from Microsoft and RealNetworks. I picked RealNetworks, known far and wide for its excellent user experience ; )

I went from unix-level support to a "content application engineer" to a web developer to a UX developer in a different company, where I finally got to work with real UX problems, rather than Real's unique take on customer interactions. Next I'll be working in Flex/AIR and owning a desktop app, which is the sort of thing I've been looking forward to doing for years.

Jon

On Tuesday, December 18, 2007, at 03:36PM, "pauric" pauric at pauric.net wrote: I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers.... *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list . discuss at ixda.org Unsubscribe .... http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help http://www.ixda.org/help

I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

Great thread!

For me, it happened twice. The first time, I was a fledgling web code monkey tasked with a redesign for an employer's site. As I went along, I got so consumed with the IA, interaction, and flow of the site, that I ended up creating this ... thing ... I had no idea I had in me. Seriously - it was a big surprise.

I was gosh dern proud of my work, and was receiving so many compliments on it, that I simply decided design was my favorite thing in the world and I had to spend the rest of my life doing it.

Then I discovered Flash and saw all the wonderful potential there. Started doing tons of Flash design work, and eventually realized I needed to become a far better programmer in order to accomplish the things I wanted to do. So I moved from a position of designing eLearning courses to being a hardcore Flash developer in the Engineering dept of a major eLearning company. I continued this for another employer. Prior to this, I wrote my first book, on Flash design basics (Flash Out of the Box), did a ton of articles on Flash, and generally spent way too much time as a GMC tester for Macromedia's beta program. In other words, I got sucked into the world of programming for about 2 years, straying pretty far from design work but still struggling to do it as much as I could.

The whole time this was going on, I was all about the design of interactive experiences. I hated writing code. Interaction design was always part of my job and was always the best part of my job. I just didn't know it had a name, and I thought it was the cool, bonus stuff I got to do while I had some downtime from programming. I was always the user advocate, always focused on application and human behavior, but I was ... trapped ... in this awful world of code and bug reports.

Then one day, I read "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". And I suddenly became very focused. That was the second time I became an interaction designer. (Strangely, I've since denounced almost everything I learned from that book, but that's a different story.)

I left the programming world, focused 100% on interaction design - the things I always loved about my previous jobs, and more - and the rest is history. I'm now writing my second book on web application design.

In fact, it's what I should be working on right now, instead of this post!

Thanks again for a great thread.

-r-

biology major switch to environmental science major switch to psychology major graduate with b.a. in psych behavioral tech in supervised group living program for mentally ill adults switch to therapeutic recreation tech for mentally ill adults client vomits on my head quit job reenter school for second undergraduate degree major in computer science talk to dean of school of informatics apply for hci master's program major in hci love every minute of it graduate with my m.s work for Blackbaud

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I come from a graphic design background and am trying to pickup more and more programming bits of knowledge. I don't yet hold any title with "Interaction" in it. I'm still a very broadly titled "Web Designer" at my work, but I love it. By process of elimination (being the sole web designer) and great interest, I play the role of Interaction Designer. I definitely have an interest in the field. Baby steps, though.

I was lucky enough to have an uncle who owned his own company. I worked for him during the summer of 2000 before my freshmen year at college. At one point that summer, my uncle asked me to create a photo album for the website. I got into HTML a bit using the CoffeeCup editor and was fascinated. That gallery lead to creating a new website for the company (2001) for them and eventually reworking the website for an updated version in Flash (2004). Looking back, I disagree with the Flash site idea, but that's not the point of this thread :-)

In 2000 - first year at college - I took over the role of webmaster of my a cappella group which gave me a great canvas to work/test on. Sophomore year I picked up a second major of Graphic Design. My work tended to be fairly simple and minimalistic which is a style I wish I could stray away from every now and then but I digress. I did an internship with a multimedia design company as the web intern. It was around this time that I started to realize that confusing websites were annoying and difficult to use. I began to try to use common sense more in my designs and following basic ideas like the fact that the main navigation shouldn't outweigh the sub-nav, content should be legible, and elements should be able to breathe and easy to find/use.

As I transitioned into the real world from college and was working in SEO, I always wanted to redesign client sites to make them more usable (why work so hard to send traffic to a site that people can't easily use?). While looking for jobs in web design, wanting to leave SEO, I started to focus a lot more in CSS and usability and fell in love with both.

I love that these realms are changing so frequently, but at the same time there's so much information out there that I find it hard to wrap my head around it all in order to determine what path I want to follow or methodology I want to adopt.

Someday I will be an interaction designer! I'd get paid for doing something I try to do automatically anyway!

- Scott

Interesting topic =]

I made the decision about a year ago, actually.

I've always been a cartoonist and since 12 always wanted to do computer animation (back when sprites were big, whoop!). Then I took 3 semesters of engineering calculus in college and swore off computers as a career choice entirely. Nevertheless, I took a retail job and worked my way into tech support, then network engineering, then management. The whole time, through 10 years after college, I was constantly writing programs and "designing things" for people. I never thought I was that good, but people thought I had a knack for it. I organize stuff in my head, in pictures, so never had much of a problem figuring out how to "arrange things". I would never say I'm always right, but I like getting other people involved in the process, so my projects tend to turn out almost "community-driven". It takes a village, I guess.

I came late to the web, using it only for tech reference, but otherwise I dismissed it as a glorified phone book (which it was, until about 1998). Then I built a network for a startup company, and ended up redesigning & building their ecommerce web site (it was one of the first WYSIWYG greeting card web sites). I enjoyed the work but did almost everything. I get bored quickly if I only have one job, for some reason.

Along about a year ago I was designing my 100th or so project for my last company, and it hit me. Design (specifically, interface & interaction design) is the only job I do that makes me mad when I'm not doing it. Network engineering, tech support, coding, database design - I can let them go if needed. But fine-tuning or building an interface from scratch - that's unnerving. It gets under my skin and I can't sleep, eat or talk to anyone for days (can you tell I'm in the middle of such a project right now?).

That's when I decided I wanted to be an interaction designer, full time. Everything I do leads me further down that path, even though I'm now "doing everything" except the back-end coding for my new company. I love my job for the first time in 5 years, not just because I do what I want, but because I figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com

Original Message
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of pauric Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 3:36 PM
To: IXDA list
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] When/Where/How did you decide to be a designer?

I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

regards -pauric

It was during my junior year of college, in the graphic design program at WVU, that my professor took a group of us to a "multimedia" design conference held at Marshall University. Jim Ludtke presented the work he had done with The Residents on their Freak Show CD-ROM. There was a lot of discussion about Myst. Most importantly, Dan Boyarski showed the kinetic typography that had been done in his classes and talked about the program at CMU. I had been interested in computers ever since my grandfather purchased my family a Commodore Vic-20 ( http://designaday.tumblr.com/post/21467908 ), and had thought that Graphic Design was the perfect marriage between computers and my first love, art. That conference opened my eyes to greater possibilities, and I made it my goal to go to graduate school for a Masters in Interaction Design.

I spent my senior year mastering Director, using it to create my senior project and presentation. At the same time, I worked an internship developing a CD-ROM-based textbook in Authorware for a course for dental hygienists. By the time I graduated, I had been accepted into the program at CMU.

I guess my path was about as straight as can be. I've been extremely satisfied with my decisions.

A most enjoyable thread!
Jack

Jack L. Moffett
Interaction Designer
inmedius
412.459.0310 x219
http://www.inmedius.com

To design is much more than simply
to assemble, to order, or even to edit;
it is to add value and meaning,
to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify,
to modify, to dignify, to dramatize,
to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.

- Paul Rand

Oh, this is a good one!

I actually intended to go to school in graphic design and ended up with a social anthropology degree instead. Near the end of college I had already regretted that earlier decision and quickly enrolled in art school after getting my degree for web/multimedia design. Meanwhile, I landed a job as a copy editor and web producer for a small .com in the late 90's and we were eventually gobbled up by another .com. I transfered my roles to that company, and then transitioned to production/asset management. This new role involved working with multiple teams, releases, developing content, building out Intranet sites, and setting up and organizing file systems. After a few years and another university (this time user-centered design), I FINALLY made my way into design. I cut my teeth on visual design projects, but pushed my way towards interaction projects and ultimately landed where I'm currently at. It's been a long journey, but I'm finally happy with the type of work I'm doing. The great thing is how all of my previous work developed me for this position.

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My interest in becoming an information and interaction designer started very early.

My first icon set that I created (probably like most of my early drawings - when I was supposed to be doing something else) was when I was in the first grade in 1967:

http://www.anigami.com/jimwich /jimwich _archives /jwpicts _2 _2005 /Childhood _Drawings /4.html

TinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/ytgrhj

My first interaction design project ("hardware" and "interaction model" ) was a project I decided to do on our kitchen table in August of 1971 just before I started 5th grade. I really wanted a computer, and the only way I was going to get one was to build one. I started with the design and interaction model. I built it as well, but unfortunately no photos survived. A month later I took it to school and demoed it to my classmates (a rural school where I had the same 29 classmates from Kindergarten through our Senior year):

http://www.orbitnet.com/waybackwhen/

And as soon as I graduated from Design School (which was a combination of Product, Industrial, Graphic, Typographical, and Environmental Design), I went right into Interaction Design consulting (mostly on products in the early years) and never looked back.

One of my first post-college projects that I did myself was this flat-panel computer and associated storyboarded software model (for a smart building). All of the screenshots were done on my 128k Mac. And the model itself was all done in foamcore (and had a lot of functionality and moving features).

http://www.orbitnet.com/1985_Flatpanel_Computer/

Jim

James Leftwich, IDSA
CXO - Chief Experience Officer
SeeqPod, Inc.
Emeryville, California
http://www.seeqpod.com

Orbit Interaction
Palo Alto, California
http://www.orbitnet.com

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It was during my junior year in college. I was interning as a Mechanical Engineer for a lock company (odds are I designed the lock on the vending machine you last used). I was struggling with the the CAD system, CAD was new to the mid-market then and the software was very unusable.

Coincidently, I was working on a new lock housing. The goal was to design a stronger housing that was also easier to assemble and manufacture. I thought it would be great if someone who designed the CAD system worried as much about me as I was worrying about the folks who where going to machine and assemble my lock. Then I remembered about a term I heard in my Intro to Psych class... Human Factors or something.

I took a few of those courses, loved it. Went on to get my Masters in Engineering Psychology. Was TAing a course on Intro to interface design when I heard about a web thing being developed across campus. This web thing turned out to be Mosaic, so we introduced this into our course and was teaching our students how to design usable home pages (as they where called then). The rest was downhill (or uphill) from that point.

This is my favorite question to ask folks during a the interview process. I have hardly ever heard the same answer. Over the course of interviewing 100's of folks, I have to say a rambling path to this profession is the only path senior level folks have taken. The more Junior folks seems to have a more straight forward path.

My first inkling was eleven or twelve years ago when I created a Visual Basic UI to the phone queues of a technical support call center. It was a huge project - we thought it would be a simple integration exercise and it turned into more of an invention (a year late, untested phone switch interface, patents, you know the drill). I had access to a small usability testing lab and asked them to test my onscreen phone controls. In the FIRST THIRTY SECONDS OF THE FIRST TEST it became clear that my modal popup window was not an ideal design for a customer service telephone UI. Sigh. Simultaneous with thinking "Now we're a year and a month late..." I was thinking that I needed to learn how to make better decisions about application interfaces. I started chatting up other developers who did well at it, and eventually learned that there was a creature called a designer, and that maybe that's what I was in the process of becoming.

Now rather more circumspect with modal popups,

Michael Micheletti

On Dec 18, 2007 12:35 PM, pauric pauric at pauric.net wrote:

I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

For the designer part, it goes way back to a childhood interest in drawing. Later came an interest in the graphic design field via a fascination with the non-photo blue pencil, which I thought was really neat and opened up all kinds of magical possibilities of precision. Then came Quark (even better than a non-photo blue pencil) and I worked as a production artist at advertising agencies and wondered why art directors couldn't really use quark for what it was intended for. Next, came the web and, and there was even more of a need for people who could understand both the technical and the artistic sides. For me, the UI is the perfect overlap of these two worlds.

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Awesome thread!

How I came to be here seems like a long and winding road. But when I look at it in hindsight, it's actually more straight than I thought.

I came from an art background at a very young age. Others considered me "gifted" I just thought kids were suppose to have such artistic abilities. I then developed my interest in design cars, to designing the interiors. It then evolved to designing everyday objects in the Industrial Design program in Carleton University.

After failing the last year, I actually got bored of design until I was introduced to an awesome last year/major project working with engineers. It was a project for developing a ground control system for a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). This project got me hooked as it was extremely challenging AND worthwhile. My UI design skills were a good foundation to build upon in later years (now). I always had a curiosity towards doing the unconventional and pushing the limits.

I guess what I'm trying to say then, is I was always a Designer. And I continue to evolve.

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i have absolutely no background in design but i am extremely proficient at creating old-school pixel-based artwork and animation - a skill i developed back in the late 80s and early 90s during stints doing artwork for shareware and low-end retail game development as well as for my own custom interfaces for various programs I developed for Atari GEM (an early, single-task window manager similar to the original Mac OS).

that experience has proved extremely valuable as i had to work under significant design constraints from minimalist color palettes to limited screen resolution and I still rely upon the knowledge i accumulated when dealing with various restrictions imposed by today's platforms.

one can look back at the wealth of 80s and 90s GUI-based apps for both good (and bad) ideas of how to deal with interface problems.

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:54:33, Eric Gauvin eric at ericgauvin.com wrote: For the designer part, it goes way back to a childhood interest in drawing. Later came an interest in the graphic design field via a fascination with the non-photo blue pencil, which I thought was really neat and opened up all kinds of magical possibilities of precision. Then came Quark (even better than a non-photo blue pencil) and I worked as a production artist at advertising agencies and wondered why art directors couldn't really use quark for what it was intended for. Next, came the web and, and there was even more of a need for people who could [trim]

www.flyingyogi.com

HTML Programmer UI "Designer" (UI Engineer who did his own visuals; and badly) Producer Technologist Information Architect UI "Designer" (AGAIN) Interaction Designer

The journey took about 9 years and it wasn't until I joined this community that I really understood what design even was.

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Over the past 10 years, my interests and self-education have been: Programming Web Programming Web Design Usability (2000) Human Factors/HCI UI design (2002) narrowly-defined IxD IA broadly-defined IxD/IA/UX (2004/05)

Over the same time frame, however, my work (mostly at short-lived, student-oriented jobs) was:
IT support Web Programming IT+hardware support (2000) UI+Web Design Database Programming IA+IxD (although I didn't call it that at the time, 2002) hardware assembly/troubleshooting Web Design framework-level application programming OpenGL programming (3d computer graphics) Information Visualization Web Design+Programming (2004) IA InfoVis IxD Virtual Reality + OpenGL programming lab-based HF/Psych research "expert on a mountain"-styled heuristic evaluations (not my idea) trying to get a 'real' IxD job

I spend a lot of time trying to explain that I'm not just a techie, seemingly in the same way many IxDs have to explain that they're not just visual artists. :-/

Steven Pautz
spautz at gmail.com
http://stevenpautz.com/

HTML Programmer UI "Designer" (UI Engineer who did his own visuals; and badly) Producer Technologist Information Architect UI "Designer" (AGAIN) Interaction Designer The journey took about 9 years and it wasn't until I joined this community that I really understood what design even was.

It took several years (and job titles) for me as well (though I'm not necessarily a “real” interaction designer), getting the “final” understanding by studies concerning industrial design (where Ralph Caplan helped a lot) as well as art (Da Vinci, ironically), among others.

Anyway, I tend to claim that mere decoration (that still appears to be confused with design too often) will become almost equally important as a crucial aspect of how to create pleasant experiences.

-- Jens Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/

I started messing around with Photoshop in high-school, and it then continued through faculty with several graphic design projects. The faculty was Computer Science (translated 'programming and others'). I did ok, but wasn't really excited about what I was learning.

My interest in 'designing for the user' was caught by a very user-centered web design book (don't remember the name, sorry). Then came the HCI course, and it was by far my favorite course in faculty. Then came "About Face 2.0" and I had my mind made up : ).

My first job after graduation was as a general purpose Designer in a web start-up. I loved the job, but the start-up didn't make it : ) The 2 internships that followed were more a result of my programming skills (which came in very handy, I must admit) than my design ones, though I've tried to also use my design knowledge as much as possible.

Now I'm decided to make the move. I have no formal education in the UX area, and no official work experience. I have 3 years of learning from and through this list, a number of years of building my design skills, a number of projects in my portfolio, and extremely good feedback and references from my previous employers. And hoping to find that company that will give me the chance to prove my design skills, besides my programming ones ; )

-- Sergiu Sebastian Tauciuc
http://www.sergiutauciuc.ro/en/

On 18/12/2007, Fred Beecher fbeecher at gmail.com wrote: On 12/18/07, pauric pauric at pauric.net wrote: I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers....

What was different about the K2000 was that the pitch fine tune parameter was in cents, an actual unit of pitch and something that many musicians and most sound designers would understand. It hit me that someone took the time to adapt the machine to the musician rather than being lazy and doing it the other way round.

Some folks may know this but the Kerzweil synths where the product of Ray Kerzweil who is responsible for books such as 'The Singularity is Near' that covers what could happen if a technical singularity strikes us (which, depending on you you speak to is between 30years and never).

Off topic but his work does add a different dimension to why I do user experience (I don't call myself a designer or use the term design in my title just to result issues with being linked to visual design).

My starting point was creating games on a ZX spectrum at a very young age - the days games used to be printed in magazines and you'd type them in. No really that's what we used to do.

Stewart Dean

-88 Thought I'd be an architectht and went for a High School major in constructuion (to my knowledge at the time the best combo of art and 'technology')

Thats it, the rest you can read about in other places : )

—Niklas

On Dec 18, 2007 9:35 PM, pauric pauric at pauric.net wrote: Brian Hoffman wrote in another thread: "While many of you have followed a very straight career path into interaction design, I'm probably not alone here in having come into this field along a more winding path." I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers.... I fell off the engineering centric wagon in 1996 when I was writing code for a chip that made the LEDs flash on the [trim]

—Niklas

Niklas Wolkert
IxDA Director
http://ixda.org

Sr. Interaction Designer
Ergonomidesign
http://ergonomidesign.com
+46 (0)733 611 227

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:25:03, David Malouf dave at ixda.org wrote: HTML Programmer UI "Designer" (UI Engineer who did his own visuals; and badly) Producer Technologist Information Architect UI "Designer" (AGAIN) Interaction Designer The journey took about 9 years and it wasn't until I joined this community that I really understood what design even was.

This is almost identical to my journey-
One of a million different late 90s "Web Designers" (read: I learned HTML!), and this progressed and meandered, as in different roles I'd take on graphic design, IA, BA, etc.
By the time I realized I was even on a career path, I'd become a sort of Default UI Guy - if you needed HTML, XML/XSLT, CSS, PHP, ASP, Javascript, a layout or a new button with a 2 pixel bevel, the Java guys are too busy, so call on me!

I finally saw the light when working for a start-up producing a CRM application and the fellow mentoring me in product development introduced me to Edward Tufte's works. 7 months later, the business shut down. While I scraped for a couple years by doing unmotivated freelance work, codemonkeying just didn't satisfy anymore. I'd be frustrated with the small businesses and non-profits who just wanted a template with their logo dropped in - it wasn't a matter of money, but learning (and continuing to learn) that there's so much more - not just lines of characters and inoffensive colors, but something that appealed to my deeper appreciation of both arts and sciences.

This all led to my current position, which (much like the whole career path) started with some HTML side work, but has since blossomed into a larger world of user experience. I have the opportunity to be both a student and the go-to guy for UI concepts and issues in my company.

Since joining this community (and connecting with SIGCHI-Atlanta and UPA), I've gained quite a bit of perspective - especially with the idea that many people get to focus almost exclusively on discrete aspects of user experience, but also that there are plenty of people like me who get to play Swiss Army Designer - for better and worse.

I look forward to meeting some of you in Savannah!

Cheers,
Scott -- To be the eyes,
and ears,
and conscience
of the creator of the universe;
you fool. -Kurt Vonnegut

I have been looking into the IxD realm for about 3 years now. I chose to major in Psychology due to a natural curiosity of why people do what they do in general. And computers/technology has always kept my attention. One day I searched on the web to find out how I could apply my Psyc degree to my current career, and HCI popped up (I had never heard of it before). But I hadn't made a firm decision until about 2 months ago to try to enter the IxD field. The deciding factor was, as a web developer working for a firm with no interaction designers, but talented backend developers & visual designers, there's never any time for creating proper functional flows or conducting "usability" testing early in the project. I always found myself, during regular testing for code bugs, wishing we had more time to do things like add a logout button to a web app that users must login to. Things like that drove me crazy. Not to mention, some times we had frustrated users, even though the capabilities of the apps were awesome. Also, after seeing some awesome usability & interface design of products such as mobile phones & operating systems, I'd like to be able to eventually branch out into doing IxD for non-web applications, such as for mobile devices.

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http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=23679

I've been a little reluctant to detail my experience because I feel I'm a bit of a thorn among the roses, but it certainly fits the "winding path" analogy! Here ya go:

I studied journalism with a minor in anthropology at Marshall University. My favorite studies were a history of modern China (alluded to in an earlier post) and a series of interdisciplinary honors classes. I wanted to write and photograph for National Geographic, but at some point I traded that dream for others; I may come back to it later. My specialized studies in anthropology involved Hopi and Navajo mythology, but I've also been much interested in the Choctaw and Kwakiutl. All these are tribal people in what is now called the United States.

My work experience has been in writing and
reporting, photography, newspaper editing, newspaper and magazine layout and design (initially with offset printing that was actually pasted up and photographed, later with Quark XPress and Adobe Pagemaker), web design including some work with javascript and ColdFusion, and (long ago) television production with particular emphasis on videography, videotape editing and lighting design. My photography initially was on film, and I learned archival black & white processing while working briefly for a museum, so I did all my own processing of various film formats for many years. I shoot mostly digital now and use Photoshop and The GiMP, among other tools. I run Ubuntu Linux on two desktops at home, and I've been using more open source software including Scribus (DTP) and Bluefish (web coding). I use Dreamweaver 8 at work and hand-code CSS at work and at home, where I maintain a few simple sites for small businesses. I hope/expect to do more site design and site maintenance in the next few years using a content management solution, maybe Drupal.

In 2002 I came to work for a state agency for
vocational rehabilitation, and my emphasis has shifted somewhat from writing/editing/photography to accessible web design (printing is far more expensive than pixels). All our clients have a significant disability, and overcoming that disability is key to getting a job. This has opened my eyes and heart to the desperate need for simplicity, semantic structure and standards compliance to accompany the mushrooming functionality of the Web.

I've learned a lot from some of my colleagues who specialize in adaptive technologies. Some are engineers who develop innovative custom solutions (mainly hardware), and others teach clients to use JAWS or Window Eyes. We've recently started outsourcing occupational, physical and speech therapy services, but they were in-house for a long time so I've also learned from seasoned professionals in those disciplines. We've had numerous clients here with traumatic brain injury, so I've had opportunities to observe different kinds of cognitive disability. Of all the things I've learned, the key one is "don't make something complicated when it ain't."

I'm part of a group of state-employed web developers who sponsored a design contest for our peers last year. I wrote up pretty thorough accessibility assessments for each of the nine finalists, and on the basis of that alone I've been asked to talk about web accessibility to some people who develop distance learning strategies for the state of West Virginia, where I live. It may be the last time I'm asked to speak, but I'm just as eager to listen to their needs and intentions.

My time has been spent primarily here and in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Guam, where I lived from age 14 to 24. I speak and understand a fair amount of Spanish, Chamorro (the language of Guam and the Marianas Islands), and a bit less Japanese. For a few years in Guam, I directed weekly TV news programs in Mandarin, Korean, Chamorro, Japanese and
Tagalog. Also in Guam, I photographed and videotaped part of the war refugee exodus from Vietnam in 1975-76. I've studied the philosophies of India, China and Japan with particular emphasis on Zen Buddhism and the writings of LaoTzu. I have a mantra given to me personally by a real live guru, and I'm not afraid to use it. I've practiced taijiquan for about 15 years. I am not and never have been a hippie. I surfed some pretty big waves and raced sailboats (and won!) in my teens and twenties. My three teen-aged children live with their mom some 250 miles away, and I miss them; I pay child support faithfully and see them as often as possible. I'm 51 years old. I believe in God, but I may not perceive God as you do, and that's OK with me. And though this paragraph may suggest that I'm some kind of nut, I do not have ADHD and I'm very laid-back most of the time. I do occasionally react when I should instead act, and that's an unresolved bug in my own interaction design; yes, it's been reported.

I also sing and play acoustic fingerstyle guitar, write my own songs and adapt or rearrange songs written by others. I've done this since the early 1970s. I record music on computer and mix it using Audacity, with the idea that I may eventually produce a CD for friends and family. I do this mostly for my own amusement, but I think that an understanding and love of music has informed most of my life and work.

All the above details have some impact on my work because I'm passionate about living and I don't live in a vacuum. I've been fortunate to always do work that I care about, and I think my efforts generally are in the right direction or I'd be doing something else.

I believe our ability to share information
is essential to maintaining and improving human civilization. In these changing times, I'd like to be one of the people helping to push the medium out of the way so the messages can come through undistorted. This sometimes puts me at odds with people who design with needless complexity, but I'm essentially a decent guy who respects your right to veer off that path because I've done it myself.

Didn't mean to write a manifesto, but felt some of this may be useful for context. If not, mea culpa.

Jeff Seager

The best games are on Xbox 360. Click here for a special offer on an Xbox 360 Console. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/wheretobuy/

Hi! In my first post here... sorry if it's inappropriate...I just wanted to say that your manifesto is useful for one context, that is, the one that life in general creates. It was very inspiring, and I thank you. I'm thinking about Hesse, maybe because I'm reading him, or maybe not just that.

Vlad F

On Dec 20, 2007 11:27 PM, Jeff Seager abrojos at hotmail.com wrote: I've been a little reluctant to detail my experience because I feel I'm a bit of a thorn among the roses, but it certainly fits the "winding path" analogy! Here ya go: [...]

Didn't mean to write a manifesto, but felt some of this may be useful for context. If not, mea culpa.

Jeff Seager

My path is somewhat similar to Nick Q from earlier in the thread.

Start out as pre-med Biology major
Take a psych class and think it's super interesting Switch to psych major w/ a slight focus on cognition and aging, intending to end up as a geriatric psychiatrist
Work in a judgment and decision making research lab (Paradox of Choice is old news)
Work in a medical/healthcare decision making lab, where I taught myself PHP and built a (pretty decent for a noob) website for the program in addition to the research work
Apply to med school
Get into med school
Realize I am more interested in creating tools to allow people to make better decisions than practice medicine
Withdraw med school acceptance on last possible day... now what Enter a master's HCI program
Decide that the focus on usability evaluation is less interesting to me than design (no offense intended Jared)
Take the few design-y classes offered and read designer's blogs and books voraciously
Graduate
Work for mental health agency designing their electronic medical record and a personal health record targeted at people with severe mental illness

Might as well pitch in my 2c of history:

I think it all began back in the mid-80s when I overheard my parents arguing about whether they should get a computer. I distinctly remember my dad saying:

"A computer!? The only computer I'll ever need is [pointing to his head] *right here.*"

I sat in the back of the car and thought to myself, "*Really???*"

Flash forward years later as I'm applying to colleges, thumbing through application packets with lists of majors: "Hmm...is there anything in here where I can study how to create tools that help people work better? Ahh...Computer Engineering sounds about right."

Two quarters of Computer Engineering classes later, I realized that I wasgetting the "create tools" part, but not so much the "help people work better" part. So I switched my major to Cognitive Science, not only because it seemed like a better fit, but also because those classes were just more enjoyable. I specialized in HCI, but the general Psych, Neuroscience, Anthropology, and CS classes have all helped me greatly on my path.

I continued on to work toward a Masters in HCI/Design, and it was only then that I realized that I was meant to be a Designer more than anything else. It was only when I began to study Design that all the other stuff I had studied became concepts I could practically apply to real world problems.

That's my story.

Josh

On Dec 21, 2007 9:03 AM, Vlad Fratila sparkle.vlad at gmail.com wrote:

Hi! In my first post here... sorry if it's inappropriate...I just wanted to say that your manifesto is useful for one context, that is, the one that life in general creates. It was very inspiring, and I thank you. I'm thinking about Hesse, maybe because I'm reading him, or maybe not just that. Vlad F On Dec 20, 2007 11:27 PM, Jeff Seager abrojos at hotmail.com wrote: I've been a little reluctant to detail my experience because I feel I'm a bit of a thorn among the roses, but it certainly fits the "winding path" [trim]

-- http://josh.ev9.org/weblog

It's so inspiring to read about people's journeys into the arena of design! Thanks to all who've shared. Here's my story...

I have always been a designer, but did not know it for many years. I've always drawn, and imagined things that did not exist, and tried to make the world a more user-friendly place. I love to put things together, and was always the lone girl in the model airplane shop. One of my fondest memories when I was living in Beijing, China from 1983-1985 (when I was 10 - 12 years old) was spending a weekend creating a model of a washing machine that worked without electricity...cutting up straws and taping cardboard and all that good stuff!

My freshman year at Stanford, I tried to get into the over-crowded ME 101 course, but was bumped for being too young and writing down "English" as my potential major. Ah, the road not taken! So I was a Modern Thought & Literature major while studying in Paris, France during my junior year. With a crazy guy I met there, I spent many long nights inventing & building a novel triangular binder system (and we design-patented it, too) as well as starting up a business doing trompe l'oeil paintings in people's homes. But apparently my bourgeois self still didn't realize that I could make a career out of making things....

Flash forward two years after graduating with a terribly useful English & French Literature degree. With a go-nowhere day job, I was charged up by doing interior design projects for friends. When I sat down to make a list of possible career moves, I was mainly pondering whether I should a) go to art school or b) pursue a philosophy PhD. Then, the lightning bolt struck me: that DESIGN would unite the creative & analytical parts of myself.

I could go on about my steps & career after that (attending San Francisco State University for a master's degree, freelancing in web, graphic & exhibit design, and then getting recruited by Cooper) but this thread is about that revelatory moment. For me, it truly was a thunderous experience to recognize that there was a professional path that would let me imagine, create, and make things for a living.

All the different design fields that I have studied formally thus far (interior, exhibit, web, graphic, industrial and interaction) share a common process and approach. Practice in any makes you stronger in all. I didn't even know about interaction design at the time of my epiphany in 1997, but for me, this amazing field we are championing has the perfect combination of human psychology, concrete analysis, artistic creativity and intellectual rigor, with a nice dash of theory & philosophy thrown in for good measure. Woo!!

Cheers,
Liz

P.S. Merry Christmas to those that celebrate such a holiday (I'm utterly secular about it myself), and Happy New Year to all!

P.P.S. Don't forget to send in your application for a position on the IxDA Board of Directors before Dec 28! : )

Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=23679

P.P.P.S. Oh, yeah, and computers have always been a part of my life. My dad was a Systems Analyst and just naturally adopted them at home. We had an Atari and TI-99 when I was a kid, and Osborne, the first "portable computer" (it went with us to China, and later went with me to Stanford where it promptly gave up the ghost). I typed in a few of those games from magazines myself. ; ) But I never have really wanted to code the things, until this year when I've decided to learn some Ruby. It's another language, right?

Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=23679

This is a great thread! One for the archives for sure.

My path to IxD started when I was a kid and we got our first C64 I suppose. I immediately took to programming, and when we got an Appl IIe with Logo on it graphics became my main interest.

From there I got more and more into computers and technology until

eventually I found myself trying to choose a university. I had originally planned to go to CompSci at Waterloo... but then I started taking art classes and realized there was a place for somebody who loved both art and technology. I ended up going to Ryerson University for their fantastic New Media BFA program. It was there that I started to learn about interactivity as a discipline and practice. I spent four years conceptualizing and building interactive art.

At school I met a lot of really interesting people, got involved in some great organization (www.interaccess.org) and learned a lot about interaction, art, and graphic design.

When I started working it was really hard to find a design job that wasn't just graphic design, so I ended up on the technical side for a while doing interface development at interactive agencies. Yet somehow I was always the one fighting with the designers and managers on the user's behalf, which eventually led me to where I am today.

I've been working for six years with various titles but always in the area of UI design and development. Now I'm the Interface Lead for a startup called BiblioCommons, designing a new app for public libraries, and I love it.

Thanks for this thread pauric! It's been really interesting to read everybody's stories and see how diverse a group we really are.

On Dec 18, 2007 3:35 PM, pauric pauric at pauric.net wrote: Brian Hoffman wrote in another thread: "While many of you have followed a very straight career path into interaction design, I'm probably not alone here in having come into this field along a more winding path." I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers.... I fell off the engineering centric wagon in 1996 when I was writing code for a chip that made the LEDs flash on the [trim]

-- Matt Nish-Lapidus
work: matt at bibliocommons.com / www.bibliocommons.com -- personal: mattnl at gmail.com / www.nishlapidus.com

My path:

film/video studies (undergraduate), low-level film/video production jobs ==

master's program in communication arts specializing in telecom policy but including more video and film stuff, as well as programming (Pascal), general interest in shaping new communications technologies == teaching studio television production ==
parallel track (all along) music performance ==
work as project manager for new telecom technologies for a university extension service ==
year of free-form bicycling in Asia resulting in 0 idea of how to make a living ==
sudden inspiration that I could do technical writing after several months of top 40 bands, temporary warehouse jobs, etc. ==
started doing UI design as outgrowth of technical writing work, realizing that a better UI could save hundreds of pages of convoluted explanation in a manual ==
working in a telecom expert systems lab doing technical writing, UI design, knowledge engineering, participatory design, ... == developing/designing Compendium http://www.compendiuminstitute.orghypermedia software tool and methods ==
project managing web projects for telecom firm ==
managing large web applications team including UI designers, IAs, developers, testers, etc. ==

Although design has been and is part of my work since the 1980s, I've never worked solely as a Designer per se, so not sure if this counts. Anyway, another data point for the discussion.

Al