When examining the design process, you cannot leave out the designer herself. As I have been exploring different readings and thoughts about the process, several questions have come to mind:

• What is good design?
• What is a good designer?
• How does one become a good designer?

Thoughtful Interaction Design by Jonas Lowgren and Erik Stolterman devotes a whole chapter to the designer, a subsection that addresses design ability.

“Every designer needs knowledge and skill related to her specific profession. Having knowledge means understanding the vast amount of specific information and techniques existing within any design field. Skill concerns the necessary craftmanship. Both knowledge and skill are needed if a person wants to be a good designer.”

Continuing, abilities required to be a good interaction designer are stated thusly:

• Creative and analytical ability
• Critical judgment
• Rationality and ability to communicate
• Knowledge of technology and material
• Knowledge of technology use
• Knowledge of relevant values and ideals
• Ability to appreciate and compose aesthetic qualities

It is suggested that developing these abilities is a personal journey: “everyone has to develop her own way of becoming a good designer.” Lowgren and Stolterman then suggest that becoming a good designer is a question of “designing oneself as a designer.”

For me, this statement collides with my thesis project, which explores identity and self expression: how products, services, and perhaps people you know act as a means of designing yourself. I have wondered about designing myself as a designer, transforming myself into an interaction designer through school, embracing of the subject matter, and surrounding myself with markers and stickies.

Well, perhaps. Lowgren and Stolterman say, “that to act as a designer, you have to be able to think about yourself as a designer.” They continue, “Becoming a good designer is to some extent a design endeavor, and not an easy one.”

I agree, becoming a good designer isn’t easy, which is why there is a lot of bad design, and will likely continue to be a lot of bad design. The situation reminds me of writing. Nearly everyone can write. Just like everyone can design by picking out clothes to wear and paint for their houses. However, not everyone can write well. Nor can everyone design well.

With Emergence over, my attention has turned to my neglected theses endeavors. Earlier this week I bought a bunch of books, some of which arrived the past few days.

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• Design Methods by John Chris Jones
• How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified by Bryan Lawson
• Design Thinking by Peter G. Rowe
• A Sense of Self: The Work of Affirmation by Thomas J. Cottle

I skipped right to the end of How Designers Think to a chapter called “Towards a model of designing” as I’m interested in model that attempts to explain what’s happening between research and actual design. I found the following tidbits intriguing.

Unfortunately, the really interesting things that happen in the design process may be hidden in designers’ heads rather than being audible or visible.

And…

Designing is far too complex a phenomenon to be describable by a simple diagram.

I’m wondering if these two statements alone make my investigation moot.

Interaction Designer, Adaptive Path, Summer 2007

Charmr was an internal R&D project at Adaptive Path inspired by an Open Letter to Steve Jobs by a prominent diabetes blogger, Amy Tenderich. The goal was to generate enthusiasm for human-centered thinking and inspire broader change throughout the medical device and design industry.

In eight weeks, we went from user research with diabetics to final concept of what the experience could be. My role included conducting interviews, background research, research synthesis, concept generation, and communication of the envisioned experience.

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More information can be found on Adaptive Path’s website.

One of the great things about being at Adaptive Path is that I have access to the cello-playing man who wrote Designing for Interaction, Dan Saffer. Today I sat down with him to talk about the direction my essay is going, as it’s somewhat of a commentary on the perception of interaction design in current practice.

It was the first time he and I really talked much about our ideas of interaction design (we’ve talked about other things, just not interaction design as a practice so directly). And it was great to pick his brain to find out whether I am either way off or making assumptions about some of the thoughts and gut feelings I have that are influencing my essay.

He was mostly supportive. And not that I don’t value my judgment, but it was nice to validate my thoughts with someone of his stature in the interaction design world.

As for the essay, it’s about the need for interaction design to distance itself from the web. This is something that I have been thinking about throughout the summer having encountered in a practicing world that seems to still largely view interaction design as being tied to the domain of web design. Not that all practice thinks of itself this way. But I think it will be good for Adaptive Path’s audience.

I’ve got a good outline of what I want to say, which I ran by Dan. Now I just need to crank it out. That’s what the last day of the internship is for.

CMU has a news story in its Corporate Visitors section regarding the studio 2 projects with Shelley Evenson we did this past spring in collaboration with Motorola. It includes a definition of interaction design by Shelley, and a synopsis of each group’s concept.

Notable is the article’s focus on interaction design, referring to the studio course as the “annual graduate studio in interaction design,” even though their were folks from the communication planning and information design program (CPID).

But also important is Motorola’s desire to share the projects within the company and continue to strengthen its ties to CMU.

“We wanted to bring people back to Motorola to show off the results,” [Rick] Hoobler, [Motorola design manager in experience planning and design,] said, “[everything was] received very well.” He went on to say that the concepts are continuously being shared across the company.

In addition to dipping into the campus think tank for creative ideas, Hoobler said that Motorola also hoped to broaden their relationship with Carnegie Mellon and to recruit more from the university in the future. As a School of Design alumnus, he knows the quality of thinking and dedication to excellence that the school has to offer and his prior relationship with university faculty lent a critical hand to the partnership. And based on the exceptional performance of the class, recruiting from the program will certainly continue. “We feel like there’s a good synergy between our design group and the school,” Hoobler said, “and we’re looking forward to bigger and better things.”

No, I didn’t buy an iPhone. But I got my hands on one over the weekend and played around with it for a few minutes. First impression. Wow. It’s fun just to navigate around with your finger and spin your contacts up and down. Great interaction. And it looks fantastic. The word on the street is this completely changes everything. And I agree.

(Read Daring Fireball’s complete review.)

I also finally got to play with the Wii this weekend. My first game of boxing was a bit awkward. I got KO’d by some girl I didn’t know and was out of breath at the end. I played a couple more games and found that the interaction for that was great as well. I felt like the knowledge and skills of the real-life sports could be translated and applied to the virtual game. The games weren’t difficult to learn because my body was the controller.

I watched some folks create Miis, and I think there is definitely more potential for visual representations of self that interact in virtual environments. I suppose Second Life is like this, but not quite as accessible to the masses. Perhaps too much so linked to being on a computer. The folks creating Miis seemed to be having the allusive fun that designers strive for. They weren’t just creating avatars of themselves, but extending and exploring what they could be.

How do you design products and services that do that?

The other day we had a lecture on design research. We were first asked what we thought design research was. There was silence.

“I know what research is,” I thought. But design research. Why did the posing of the question make it seem different?

I ventured a guess. “Methods,” I said. It went on the board. And eventually we came up with a list.

• methods
• literary review
• product research
• process
• case studies
• critical design
• theory
• design for knowledge

The last one really interested in me: designing to create knowledge. We also mentioned artifacts as knowledge. I had not really considered this before, but the idea of creating knowledge through design seemed intriguing.

Though after thinking about it for a bit, it certainly doesn’t seem like anything new, as throughout time artifacts have embodied knowledge.

Still, the lecture struck me. And as I consider thesis topics, I’m wondering if this could fit in with my unformed idea.

As the lecture continued, another point that stood out was that interaction design has yet to make an impact outside its community. Why is this? Is it simply a matter of industry not yet fully accepting the value of interaction designers?

What will happen when interaction design make an impact? Will the world become a better place? Will there be enough interaction designers?

Is the answer lots of interaction designers? Are lots of interaction designers desirable? Can we be mass produced?

I won’t tell you where I found time to read “Strong Words” by Véronique Vienne in the March/April 2007 issue of PRINT, but I did. The article questions the wisdom of changing the AIGA’s name a year ago from “American Institute of Graphic Arts” to “The Professional Association of Design,” and has a very interesting take on defining the job of a designer.

I was sucked into the article because it started by talking about words in general, and the second sentence contained “sex.” But I kept reading because the definitions of “graphic” and “graphics” were explored, and then became quite curious at the mention that the “graphic design label had been a thorn in the side of graphic designers for some time.” I didn’t know.

This followed with a list of titles graphic designers give themselves: visuals editor; image maker, branding specialist, problem solver, information architect. The list reminded me of a conversation I had with some random guy on the ski lift this past Saturday whereby I was attempting, yet again, to define interaction designer. He asked me what kind of job I would get. “Engineering?” (Boy, I must work on my definition if that’s the response.)

Realizing that saying I can get a job as an interaction designer to someone who is asking me what job I can do as an interaction designer would not work, so I listed some titles that he might understand: experience designer, design strategist, not engineering.

Getting back to the article:

“Graphic design professionals had accepted the fact that they had no formal job description. Not being able to explain what you did was an occupational hazard.”

This sounded a lot like my dilemma as an interaction designer, minus the acceptance. Having recently written a paper on what is interaction design, I was really curious about Vienne saying that she encourages her students never to try to explain graphic design to anyone. “You’ll be able to charge more for your services if your clients don’t quite understand the nature of your business.”

That seems to fly in the face of what I have been learning. The current thinking about design at CMU is to educate or involve others in the design process and advance design thinking.

First, I don’t agree with the statement ethically, as it sounds devious and as if money is the primary concern of the designer. Of course, I’m in grad school la-la land, so I may be more idealistic at the moment.

Second, while I still think there will always be some mystery in what designers do, I disagree with there being more value in your work if others don’t know how you got there.

Maybe it works in graphic design that showing an end product without explanation of the process works for clients, but it seems that in interaction design the clients would and should be invested in how you derived your conclusions even if you can’t fully explain the leap of faith along the way.

Due to some unfortunate miscommunication, the resumes that the design grad students need to submit for distribution to the companies that will be courting us during a job fair later this month are not due on Monday, but tomorrow.

Lovely.

So guess what I’m working on?

Fortunately, my resume prior to grad school is in pretty good order. But, as my previous work did not have a focus on design—at least in title and what people thought I was doing—I decided to do a Google search for “interaction designer resume” to see what interaction designers have to say about themselves.

There are three things I noticed from looking at the results of this search:

1. Interaction designer resume sites are not well designed, graphically
2. What many list as interaction design does not sound like interaction design to me
3. My search wasn’t all that helpful

Tomorrow we are required to turn in a two-page, single-spaced essay answering the question What Is Interaction Design? This is a question that many have attempted to answer, but for which there is no consensus given the multidisciplinary background of interaction design and its intangible nature.

Incidentally, I finished Dan Saffer‘s Designing for Interaction tonight. I had a few pages left and thought it might be helpful for the writing at hand. Indeed, it was. Overall, I give the book high marks (and I’m not just saying that because Dan sometimes reads my blog). I enjoyed it because it coincides nicely with my graduate study (likely because he attended the same program a few years ago) and fills in the blanks in a few cases.

I enjoyed the chapters on service design and the future of interaction design the most. The glimpse into the future seems wicked exciting: robotics, wearables, ubiquitous computing. Of course, that future is pretty much now.

In a somewhat uncanny and somewhat perfectly logical fashion, Bill Moggridge‘s Designing Interactions showed up in the mail today.

I also finally got About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. I say “finally” because it seems like I should have already read this book. Of course, I have no time to read it now. But it looks good on my bookshelf.

Apparently, I digress. My definition of interaction design? You’ll have to wait till I’m done with my essay. And as I have already wasted enough time, I’ll go back to writing.