Designing for clients, designing within enterprises, insights from conferences and events, and growing your career. Whether you are new to the design field, or an established professional, you’ll find inspiring guidance in these posts. And perhaps a few warnings of what to avoid.
Part 1: My entrée into the web world—Spaceland, or “Hyperspace”—was not a smooth one; in fact, it was downright mind-bending. My personal journey from designing and writing for print media to becoming an information architect for websites conjures up images of Flatland, written by Edwin A. Abbott, an English clergyman, educator, and Shakespearean scholar (1884).
Continue readingThe first-ever CHI-AIGA Experience Design Forum was greeted with a real Minnesota welcome. Snow. Several inches of it. But inside the Minneapolis Convention Center there was a warm sense of camaraderie among the Forum attendees, who came in from both the CHI and AIGA communities, a hopeful sign for future collaboration among the two groups, as well as the practitioners they represent.
Continue readingCHI, the annual conference for ACM’s special interest group on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) was, as usual, packed with information, research findings, and hotly debated theories. In this article I’ll try to cover the events and topics that were most interesting to me as well as the issues that stirred up the most intense conversations during breaks or at social gatherings afterwards.
Continue readingAttending conferences often crystallizes the direction of a career or confirms choices made as people meet and communities bond over similar goals. It isn’t often that you hear about someone throwing off the mantle of a title or dropping out of a discipline altogether. David Heller explains why he feels the title IA isn’t appropriate to what he does anymore.
Continue readingA recent book captures a larger movement within the academic field of human-computer interaction away from its traditions of behavioral science and engineering towards “interaction design.” But re-labeling isn’t enough, it also requires a shift in philosophical foundations as well as professional practice, and the language of HCI is not the best place to look for inspiration.
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