How the lessons of Industrial Light & Magic may portend the future for interactive designers

You don’t necessarily need to be a master of Flash, Silverlight or even HTML to be considered a ‘Web’ or ‘Interactive’ designer…yet. But I’ve often speculated that those days are coming to a close. I wonder how much longer they will last?

Designers will often say it’s not about the tools, and it’s not—but it is about craft and many of the most successful designers realize that to truly master their craft they must have an understanding of the underlying technology and principles that will ultimately bring their vision to life. We see this clearly in the Web and in design with folks like Jeremy Keith and Joshua Davis and companies like 37 Signals but if you spend a bit of time on the IXDA discussion list or any of the professional organizations or conferences that cater to interactive design it seems as if a majority of designers are doing everything they can to ensure they don’t need get out of their comfort zone of wireframes, Photoshop comps and design artifacts that no one really bothers to look at.

History is littered with far too many examples of industries and trends that happened so quickly that entire disciplines were rendered economically worthless almost over night.

One company that painfully survived this transition was George Lucas’ special effects house Industrial Light & Magic. This transition is discussed briefly today on IO9.com in The Genesis Effect, the Liquid Metal Terminator, Davy Jones and Jurassic Park’s dinos: How ILM transformed movies, and it’s worth a read to understand how challenging the transition from analog to digital modeling was.

In the world of devices, apps and HTML 5 I’m just wondering how long some of these archaic practices are going to hold out and I’m also wondering if higher education programs are truly preparing designers for entering a world where understanding the difference between managed and unmanaged code or what a MVC framework is might not be such a bad thing to know—even as a designer.

Comments

[Dave Malouf]

Hi Chris, a very timely article indeed, for me anyway.
I am totally torn on this topic (this may turn into a blog post).

Let's first say that w/o giving too much away, the timeliness of this piece is due to my current position here at SCAD, as an IxD educator & the major project I'm working on.

I think what I am discovering is that there is IxD education & there is Interactive design Education. And despite google's insistence to keep them synonyms there are deep differences btw the 2. Or more accurately there can be depending on the breadth or narrowness or just plain direction of the specific program.

At the undergraduate level, I completely agree with you. Students should be taught tangible craft of interactivity as a form of code. I'd say an intermediate ability in the following technologies are base: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP & My SQL. Rambunctious students schooled learn a higher order programming system like Objective-C or Processign depending on their long term interest. Technologies like Flex/Flash or the .NET platform can be learned on their own with this solid base or the student should really be in a technical program & not a design program.

At the graduate level though we have a huge problem. Students to graduate education programs come from widely disparate experiences & have widely different goals in mind. Many programs like CMU have combined IxD & Service (most less explicitly) which we at SCAD are going to have 2 distinct programs. But even in the IxD program we are combining media arts, interactive design & strategic IxD all together as we believe that art is a primary influence of design, an idea that you can't execute is not OK, and solid solutions are grounded in research, theory, holistic strategy, and rhetorics.

I think the issue you are describing is not about ppl being short-sighted so much as the huge variability of practices. There are many practices where the generalist, viz, dev, research, behaviorist is a requirement & there are just as many practices where the UX Pro is a just as much of a reality.

I think it really difficult for grad programs to serve all the continuums that need explicit serving. BTW I see the need of the Viz IxD to be much more important than the Dev IxD.

- Dave