Over the last 8 years I have seen a slew of questions on the IxDA site and LinkedIn about information regarding schools for interaction design and how do I choose a school and what not. After close to a decade, I don’t expect the questions to end, as people will always think that their take on the question is special or more relevant. So this is not an attempt to end the questions, but hopefully an attempt to aid people to think better about why they are asking and to be more specific about what they are asking for.

This post will be mostly about grad schools as almost everyone in my network asking is really thinking about grad school, so I’ll continue with that assumption.

Why do I need a degree at all?

Well this really depends. There are tons of high-ranking designers out there in the world who barely passed their BA let alone did any grad school whatsoever. But exceptions as they may be, most likely they climbed the glass escalator at a time when these degrees didn’t exist, or hell, they are just awesome. While I love the advice “Be Awesome!” I do think it doesn’t scale very well and some of us need a leg up from time to time to fill in the gaps and create new networks and design additions to our portfolio.

The best reason to go to grad school is not to break the glass ceiling (though it is a good reason depending on your area of interest). It is because you are hungry. You have a topic that you want to figure out to create a thesis out of, or you are hungry for more knowledge or skills (hopefully both).

While I understand that there is a strong voice out there advocating for non-institutional education, I don’t believe that everything is learnable in as timely a manner in a self-directed way, nor does everyone learn best without direction. And unfortunately my experience is that few senior designers out there have time/energy to dive deeply with apprentices in this day and age. Few organizations and work models today allow for it.

When you pay an institution for your education you are getting a few things put in place for you:

• Resources: tools, connections, curriculum
• Accreditation: As much as we argue about this, the truth is that parts of this system do indeed work and throwing out the baby with the bathwater makes no sense. Accreditation forces institutions to formalize and structure curriculum to map against agreed upon thresholds for assessment and outcomes. You can always surpass them, but you can’t go below them, too easily.
• A coalesced and packaged network of peers, alumni and faculty.
• A pig skin (piece of paper, possibly). While arguably important, for many types of organizations that masters degree is used as a gatekeeper to certain positions.

A very important & often glossed over reason for institutional education is the exchange between industry and education. You send us students, we create a space where we can more easily and arguably more cheaply create new knowledge. So many of today’s greatest companies came from the “incubator” of education, and many more ideas that are used by industry today as well.

Finally, many people go to get a formal graduate education because they are interested in a career in academia at least part-time. Looking at the previous issue where academia and industry are in dialog, we must assume that for this dialog to take place there can not only be students in the system but also masters and doctors (teachers & researchers).

Online vs. In person

The reality is that some people will not be able to travel to find the right program or their station in life (spouse & kids) don’t afford them the possibility of relocation and their current city doesn’t have a program that fits. So there are tons of reasons why an online program might suit you better than an in person education.

I would also say that an online education may be appropriate or not depending on the topic of study. Skills-based design programs that are trying to teach you tools, methods, and processes might work in this environment. Knowledge-based theory & research programs have even a greater chance to work in this environment. However, programs that are about teaching thinking, apprenticing applied knowledge within a studio environment have the least chance of success further if your chosen profession moves beyond digital it becomes even that much harder to emulate the studio–e.g. industrial design or even physical computing prototyping.

But let’s say all being equal. You want an HCI degree that is taught close by but also online. Would the education be better offline or online? I have the inclination to think that the portfolio of the student working offline who has access to a real professor face to face, who can work with her peers doing group projects together or otherwise gain shared knowledge and experience will be better. I say this cautiously as my own institution has some reputable (as in award winning) online programs some of which with studio work.

I personally think that in many cases a hybrid approach of both remote and in person education is probably best, though this model is difficult to fit within many institutions’ structural models and may not overcome all the obstacles that students face.

Questions to ask

While no one can tell you what program to go to, they can tell you what questions to ask the programs you are interested in and what questions you need to ask yourself.

Questions for you

• Why do I want to study?
  This question more than any other needs to be clear to you. The most popular reason is that I need a degree because hiring managers are asking for it. Ok, I can buy that, but graduate education is hard. It is a lot of work, a lot of time commitment and usually some sacrifice of financial resources, often considerable. That being said you better look a little deeper inside of yourself and find something else to inspire, engage, and energize yourself for the next 12-24 (sometimes up to 36) months of hard labor. Some better answers could be:
  • I am excited about a topic that if only I had the dedicated time I could really have fun diving down into.
  • I have come far in my career, but I am missing core skills that I could get from a graduate education. Those skills that I need are. The programs that are best at teaching me those skills are.
• What are the limitations I have in terms of resources and logistics?
  This question is pretty easy to answer, but articulating it out loud is still important. This is your technological constraints that are basically without drastic forces cannot be changed. These include:
• Money: do I have it in the bank? Can I take on loans? Do I have any white knights? Will my job help support this? Can I afford not to work?
• Location: Am I tied down to THIS spot? Can I go international (this may impact money)? Does my spouse have geographic constraints (how mobile or geo-versatile is their career)?
• Family life: married? children? older?
• When I’m done with my studies what do I want to be doing?
  Too many people go into a graduate degree not thinking about where they want to land when they are done. It’s OK that the plan you have changes during the experience, but it is really important that you go in with a plan. At minimum though you should be honest with yourself that the degree you are looking for is about you “finding yourself”.
  Something that many people don’t consider and I have hoped more would consider this is that not all masters degrees are equal. When it comes to the academic world there is something called a “terminal degree”. This is the degree in your profession that is considered the minimum for teaching within an academic institution (without justification by an accrediting body). If there is any bone in your body that is hungry to teach at an academic level please be sure you go with the right degree. In the United States this means getting an Masters of Fine Arts or Masters of Design in Interaction Design or a PhD in many of the HCI or Library Sciences.
  The other answer this question will bring up is what type of position are you looking to work in. Is it a design studio position or a research & engineering position? Answering this question will take you one way or another and there are few programs that handle both these paths equally well. I can’t think of either.
• Can I devote myself to a full-time course, or do I need to reserve much of my time for other endeavors?
  Not everyone can quit their job and study full-time (which is much more than 40-hours per week). And some programs to afford people the possibility of doing part-time studies both in person and online. I will say that online programs are much easier to do while working, and hybrid programs that require in-person class time, while offering mostly online remote learning are often the perfect balance for working students. These seem to be rare in the design community though.

Do your homework

Going to graduate school is not like going to undergraduate. Learn about the programs individually as in many cases there are issues that can directly impact your learning.

• Learn about the faculty
  What I mean by this is that your success in graduate school is tied to how well you fit with both the other students and more importantly the faculty you are studying with. In some programs you are not just studying with faculty but you are working directly for them doing their work. I realize that many think of education in our line of work as merely vocational, but even so, the topics that interest your faculty will take your work in specific directions that you may or may not want to go in.
• Learn about the industry relationships the program has.
  This will effect the types of project work you get to work on and what types of employment opportunities you might expect after finishing or even as internships in between.
• Learn about the alumni.
  Where did alumni end up after they graduated? This will most likely be the greatest networking opportunity and thus job placement resource you’ll have. Find out where alumni are ending up. You’ll most likely end up there or at least near by.

Do not look at HCI and Interaction Design and Information Architecture as comparable?

Many times I see online the question about what school should I go to to learn User Esperience and I want to cringe. I want to cringe because they’ll list such disparate programs in terms of focus of study. I know we all want to think that user experience is the same all over and that specifying anything under this umbrella is not helpful. However, this is not true at the graduate level of education. Generalization doesn’t do very well at this level of work. The purpose of graduate education is to dive deeper into a topic. The purpose of doing this is not necessarily because you will be diving in deeper in the roles of your career, but rather with depth comes breadth. This notion of depth leading to breadth is not well understood, but any good graduate program will require that someone diving deep will gain contextual knowledge of the breadth surrounding what it is they are working on. Further with depth comes wisdom and wisdom is something that can be applied broadly. Arguably wisdom is not reachable without depth.

If you do not know the difference between an HCI, Interaction Design and Information Architecture program, you might need to do some preliminary work first. Take the Cooper Practicum, go to a few conferences: CHI, IA Summit and IxDA Interaction to name a few that would help you out. It would also be pretty easy (and cheaper) to just join the different communities and see how they differentiate themselves and their practice disciplines. But in the end talking to people in person is key.

Conclusion

Having a list of programs is always a good start and there are many places to get a list of programs out on the Internet. What you can’t get (and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are lying) is an answer of what school to go to. This I’m afraid can only come from you. So as much as I’d love for everyone to come to my program, I would be remiss to give such advice without a thorough conversation that would include many of the questions that are above and an even deeper conversation.

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Image CC-SA2 by San Jose Library

Back in the late 1980s, Bill Verplank, when working at what would become IDEO, stopped calling what he did ‘user-interface design’, and instead coined a new term: ‘interaction design’. His work over the years has included  Xerox Parc, IDTwo/IDEO, and collaborations with design schools such as the RCA, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Steve Baty talked with him about interaction design.

You’ve been working as an interaction designer for three decades: how has your approach to your work changed over that time?

Bill Verplank

After my PhD from MIT in “Man-Machine Systems”, I went to Xerox and spent three years testing systems that had taken ten years to invent; then after the Xerox Star was introduced, we spent five years refining and extending it. So in my first decade, I did “human factors” testing and “user interface design”. This is also the decade that ACM started SIGCHI and I started teaching “graphical user-interface design”. (‘70s ‘80s)

In the next decade, I was hired by Bill Moggridge at IDTwo to move the insights from computers to products of all sorts. We called what we did “Interaction Design” and saw what we were doing as the key to modernizing “Industrial Design”. As consultants, we were dependent on clients, so for me it was a scramble to keep up with the variety of problems. When IDTwo merged with David Kelly Design and Matrix to become IDEO, we had established a new kind of multi-disciplinary design consultancy. (‘80s ‘90s)

In the third decade I have returned to invention and teaching. At Interval Research, we enjoyed the freedom to develop technologies (e.g. haptics) and methods (e.g. “body storming”). Also, we encouraged educational programs at RCA, MIT, NYU, Stanford and finally at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). My favorite post-graduate program now is a spin-off of IDII: the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). Also, at Stanford, I have been teaching Computer Science and Computer Music with a focus on the tangible aspects of interaction. (‘90s ‘00s)

Over that same period, how has the practice of interaction design changed generally?

What do we think a “computer” is? I like to contrast three dominant metaphors or paradigms: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA.

In the ‘50s, we called computers “electronic brains” and many were motivated to make them intelligent, language processors. There are still people pursuing these “anthropomorphisms”; they call it “artificial intelligence” or “robotics”. Interaction is a verbal dialog. A computer is an “agent” or “assistant” – autonomous and intelligent. Think of the computer as a “PERSON”.

In the ‘70s, rather than replicating or replacing people, Englebart proposed “augmenting intelligence” – thinking of the computer as a “TOOL” which extends and empowers us. We became “users” not just programmers or operators. Anyone who asks “Who is the user?” and “What is the task?” is very much in the business of “interaction design”. Good interaction is useful and efficient.

In the ‘90s, with ubiquitous networks, mobile, graphical and dynamic interfaces, computers are “MEDIA”. Televisions, phones, games are all computers that we watch, connect, play and mostly enjoy. A good interaction is engaging, immersive and persuasive.

PERSON, TOOL and MEDIA are sufficiently established as metaphors, we can call them paradigms; they define our business, schools and conferences. What will the next paradigms be? What will we call what we do?

Here’s a sketch I did in 2000 on Metaphors for Computers: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA – each one a robust “paradigm”. Beyond those three, I predict LIFE, VEHICLE, FASHION.

Bill Moggridge's Metaphors for Computers diagram

In your “Interaction Design Sketchbook” you write: Interaction design is a profession that will mature in the 21st century. Where do you think interaction design is currently immature, or is this more a reference to the emergence of embedded and ubiquitous computers? Implicit in that section of the IxD Sketchbook is the idea that interaction design concerns itself with computers and computer-driven interactions. Do you see a place for the practice of interaction design in non-computing environments such as services?

Interaction Design in the 21st century will be a challenge because almost everything (and everybody) we interact with will have computers in it or on it. Services and systems will be autonomous and only ask for guidance (think of automated cars and guideways); tools will be augmented and powerful; even the most mundane artifact might have far-flung connections and consequences; media will be interactive and engaging and we will all become fashion designers.

We’ve recently seen the principles of interaction design applied to situations where the aim is to shift individual or group behavior in social, economic or environmental activities. Do you see this a logical extension of the work you were doing in the 80s and 90s or a shift away from interaction design’s foundations?

Interaction Design as I practiced it, is very much in the “TOOL” paradigm; the principles were “consistent conceptual models, direct manipulation and WYSIWYG”. If the “aim is to shift individual or group behavior” then use the “MEDIA” paradigm. Advertising, education, persuasion, are at the core of ancient practices. Making media more interactive may or may not get your message across. Media can mystify and intrigue. All I know about media is that “the medium is the message” – a technocrat’s rant.

You’ll be speaking to nearly 600 interaction designers in February at the Interaction conference in Boulder. What is the one thing you’d like them to take away from your lecture?

I would like them to take away my enthusiasm for metaphors and engage in the search for metaphors that help us organize the various paradigms of professional practice.

What will the next metaphor be in your practice? Is your design motivated and organized as a form of LIFE? Or as infrastructure or VEHICLE? Or as the latest FASHION?

Verplank's professional practice metaphor simplified for Designing Interactions

Interaction 11

Bill Verplank is one of the keynotes at Interaction 11 . It has sold out, but workshop places are still available. It is the fourth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Boulder, Colorado (USA).

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Picture of Verplank: Mayonissen with CC

After teaching at Savannah College of Art and Design for close to five years, I found myself with over four hundred alumni, and I keep in touch with a large quantity of them through email. A strange pattern started to become evident in our communications: a lot of them are unhappy.

Our Passionate Youth

Students would contact me and describe how miserable they were with their jobs, asking for advice on new career paths or even entirely new professions. It wasn’t that their bosses were mean, or that their working hours were awful; it wasn’t even the larger issues we’ve all dealt with in the business context, like the misappropriation of designer as stylists, or the prioritization of technologists over designers. Instead, I began to hear how the benefits of ‘flow’ and ‘being creative’ and ‘solving really hard problems’ were being grossly outweighed by feelings of insignificance and irrelevance. My alumni were at the forefront of design, working at major consultancies and the heart of the Fortune 500 – and they didn’t feel like their work was meaningful.

I think many of us have confronted a similar feeling in their career, and we’ve rationalized meaning into our jobs. We’ve told ourselves that we were making the world a better place by making objects of beauty, or by increasing the usability of software, and that seems to satiate the concern, at least temporarily. Or, we’ve embraced management, and tried to mentor and guide other designers who were struggling with skills, theory, or career path development. And in many cases, even if these things didn’t pay off, we’ve stuck with jobs that we weren’t particularly fond of, because we had mortgages to pay and families to feed.

But for my alumni, and for the graduates that make up the 55 million millennials in the US, this doesn’t cut it. As a gross generalization, they don’t want the kids, the house, and the two car garage, and so they also don’t want the platitudes of staying the course and doing what you don’t want to do and it’s just a job. Simply, they feel entitled to a career that’s important and that contributes in a meaningful and powerful way to build a better world around them. As they find themselves in a workplace where they are designing diapers, or websites, or even the coveted jobs of designing cars and shoes, the realities of a career supporting destructive, consumptive behaviors just doesn’t seem to jive. And as they watch the banks collapse and the government flounder and the earth implode, they seem to experience a sense of personal longing – a longing for a job that matters.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is the conversation I’ve had over, and over, and over again with my alumni, and I’ve come to a simple conclusion. The creative class of 20-25 year olds won’t be satisfied playing under the old rules. Their goal and primary motivator isn’t financial capital or social capital; it’s personal recognition of meaning. This isn’t surprising, given their cultural backdrop of reality TV and Facebook profiles, and I’m certainly not the first to point this out. But the most interesting part of this desire for recognition is how it relates to the need to right the wrong and fix the broken. There’s a need – an entitlement – to work on big projects, projects with impact, and to be publically and loudly recognized for their creative efforts.

The creative class of 20-25 year olds won’t be satisfied playing under the old rules. Their goal and primary motivator isn’t financial capital or social capital; it’s personal recognition of meaning …  a need – an entitlement – to work on big projects, projects with impact, and to be publically and loudly recognized for their creative efforts.

Our Broken Educational System

Combine this pattern in the guise of modern design education, where integrated efforts between business and design are somehow seen as novel and well intentioned design educators dread the  curriculum council and petty turf war of tenure. Close to six years ago, when I was proposing a Contextual Research Methods course at Savannah College of Art and Design, the Dean of Liberal Arts essentially filibustered the course, blocking its passage through the approval process for close to a year. The reason? He felt ‘ownership’ over all aspects of research, and since no one in the design department had a PhD in Anthropology, how could they possible teach a course in contextual design research and ethnography?

These silly displays of infighting are present at nearly every educational institution in the world, and it’s against this backdrop that the aforementioned entitled students find themselves looking for direction and guidance. To be blunt, they don’t care about the credentials of their teachers; they care that their teachers are knowledgeable and passionate. They aren’t looking for incremental aspects of change that play in the context of the old guard; they see through these small steps forward in a time that requires new approaches and new passion.

There are some fantastic educational programs that have reacted to the changing space of design. New transdisciplinary efforts at Parsons have great potential; existing efforts like the KaosPilot School in Denmark serve as a template for new educational models. But these programs are the exception, and the design students graduating from schools of Art and Design are still learning the tired design-as-form-giving approaches of Bauhaus-driven foundations.

Students at universities frequently suffer the same lagging curricula, as the pace of academic change is slow. A few schools have managed to keep pace with industry, or even lead industry in a particular direction. The well known d.school program at Stanford, under the leadership of  David Kelley and Larry Leifer, and the Rotman School of Management, under the leadership of Roger Martin, have helped advance the role of designers in corporations to unprecedented levels of access, and have helped substantiate design as an independent and worthwhile endeavor.

These programs prepare students for bringing the intellectual power of design to the boardroom to solve the gnarly problems of corporate strategy.

But what if the same educational model was presented with a focus exclusively on transformation of our world around us? The students are clamoring for it, and the world is seemingly ready to embrace a model that doesn’t position corporate vs. consultancy, with the occasional NGO thrown in for good luck. This isn’t even a new idea, as it was fundamental to the design philosophies of Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek, and taught (to me, and countless other generations, at Carnegie Mellon) by Richard Buchanan and Craig Vogel.

Transforming the Wicked Problems

It’s in response to these students, and to these traditional problems of academia, and in the spirit of Buchanan and Vogel’s teaching that I’ve started a new educational institution: The Austin Center for Design. The program is entirely focused on Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurship, with an explicit spotlight on designing for massive change and social innovation. The center exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems.

I have no misconceptions that designers can ‘solve’ massive problems, or even approach them on their own without collaboration from other disciplines. But I feel strongly that designers make great agents of change and can champion new and novel approaches to old and tired problems. The best indicator of design success, in my experience, is a passion to make an impact, and I see a generation that is wildly passionate about addressing social problems.

I feel strongly that designers make great agents of change and can champion new and novel approaches to old and tired problems … and I see a generation that is wildly passionate about addressing social problems.

I hope other educational institutions can escape from the lackadaisical pace of academic change, and I intend to publish the entire curricula that is developed at AC4D to help support other like-minded faculty who may be stuck pushing the curricula-change rock uphill. The problems to tackle are big enough to escape ego; one school can’t possible support the talent necessary to mitigate the large-scale social problems of poverty, equality of education, or health and wellness.

These are problems worth solving.

Top image: One Laptop Per Child / cc attribution 2.0

There are many interaction designers like myself whose growth into the field was a feat of organic if not chaotic chance. Our community of practice was born out of the convergence of people who did not have the option to be formerly trained in interaction design in almost any way what-so-ever. So we educated ourselves – sometimes alone and sometimes with the support of peers and mentors. It is a common presumption that because we did it this way we have to somehow hold out a universe where that path continues to not just be an option, but to be a viable one; and one that we even laud over other more formal ones.

I believe that there has been a huge paradigm shift in the very nature of design practice and a growing shift in its education. If we do not acknowledge this shift at the core of education and career development we are doing a disservice to those who are interested in coming up the ranks as young interaction designers today. At the core of these issues is the belief in the separation between form and interaction. This myth can no longer be maintained – definitely not in education.

We can look at a definition of Interaction Design like this one by Robert Reimann: “a design discipline dedicated to defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (i.e., products)”. Therefore it is concerned with “anticipating how use of products will mediate human relationships and affect human understanding”. It is easy for us to stop there. But what is also true is that all interaction design is embedded in form (even those areas of IxD like gesture). And it is my belief that interaction design lives in these areas of communicating possibilities for action and responses to actions, surrounded by forms.

Core understandings

I have often held the ground that our discipline has a place next to other design disciplines like graphic design and industrial design in the area of practice.  We have done well as an emerging user experience culture and community to do just that along with usability testing, design research and information architecture (to name the most prominent). Due to the ways they built up UX teams this model seems to be working for many organizations. However, I would challenge that to have “design” separate from “user experience” – as many creative agencies have done; or having “user experience” be the name or structure of your “design organization” – does neither scenario any long term use and this is the basis of this article.

one of the core understandings behind IxD and even UX as a whole is to design from the point of view of the human being(s) who’s lives we want to impact through our designs

If we are to understand that one of the core understandings behind IxD and even UX as a whole is to design from the point of view of the human being(s) whose lives we want to impact through our designs, then we must also agree that it is the tone of our voice – the expression of our products & services through the various mediums that make that up – that is our ultimate tool. Thus, any true practice of design with a human focus has to be built on a foundation of traditional design that focuses on the the craft & design of perceptual mediums using methods & practices of design from the root of art over science.

Human-centered education

As a professor of interaction design at the undergraduate level, I truly believe that an education in human-centeredness is a requirement of EVERY designer, regardless of medium of interest. Each medium would have its own distinct way of looking at how to integrate the philosophy and methods of practice to work from a human-centered perspective. As I look at my courses in interaction design that I teach for our undergraduate minor, I am always stuck on either of two sides of a problem: I either need students who already know the rules and tools of interactivity; and/or I need students who are experienced in prototyping 3D forms & functions.

Since a minor is supposed to be open to all students throughout my college (SCAD.edu), it is hard for me to really cross departments effectively and efficiently. Despite this problem – which I’m working on fixing in future iterations of the curriculum coming soon – I think that the addition of an interaction design concentration is the right direction for undergraduate level education. This allows enough lower level support courses to be available to primary form-giving design programs whilst giving the opportunity to those students who wish greater depth of understanding of the particulars of interaction design. But what is ultimately true is that it is impossible to teach IxD without virtual interactivity, which means that there is always an addition to every non-graphical medium. All designers need to learn 2D interactive prototyping.

I truly believe that an education in human-centeredness is a requirement of EVERY designer regardless of medium of interest.

Growth path

This issue isn’t just related to undergraduate education, but also about early professional practice. Here is where the real controversy kicker is going to come in. Anyone with less than five years experience under their belt should not be working in a purely UX capacity. By “purely” I mean doing structural and behavioral design without also directly owning the forms within which they are embedded. What’s worse is that many organizations will not even hire entry-level designers, thus sidestepping this part of the growth path.

If I were starting out today here is what I would do:

1. Find out which design medium I like the most: interactive, industrial, architectural, graphic, interior, fashion, etc.;
2. Find a school that teaches courses in the medium I like and has either separate UX support (electives) minimally, but ideally has concentrations in UX generally & IxD specifically;
3. Intern at trans- or converged design organizations (hard to find but they exist);
4. Find a job at the same type of organization, but different.

But it doesn’t end there, right? What happens then? What happens after my fifth year? Where do I go? What do I become?

Paths to take

To be honest, there are so many variables that the options are infinite in their paths and combination. Along the way create a relationship with good mentors (don’t just ask for one, build one). However, there is a path I could recommend.

The path I’m speaking of is within Interaction Design or the similar path of Service Design (no one has still convinced me these are different and I’m looking forward to two talks at Interaction 10 to see if they can do the job). In other design disciplines there are often specializations that pop up. The clearest examples for me come out of graphic design. Not every graphic designer becomes a typographer or iconographer, but there are a few people who specialize in those areas. I see interaction design the same way. Only a few people will ever need to have this level of specification in their careers, or become educators who need the depth of understanding to teach at any level or to produce new bodies of knowledge.

Most people will continue their careers and learn enough depth in interaction design or any UX discipline through practice and professional education opportunities. Only a select few will make the leap to thought and practice leaders that requires the level of mastery and creation of “new thought” that a good Masters program should provide.

The reality is that an interaction designer without chops in form, is at best a strategist or manager.

There are other options, though, in this continuing “decade of transition” as I see the previous five years and the next five years. Certificate programs like that at Boulder Design Works could be (depending on the results, which we haven’t seen yet) one type of path for those needing some graduate level depth; transition skills education; and who are interested in media and messaging. Other programs could be similarly developed around other markets or practice types.

Reaching out

The reality is that an interaction designer without chops in form, is at best a strategist or manager and really doesn’t design (i.e. build) anything that anyone will ever understand as tangible enough to hold long term value through an ever collapsing economy. The cerebral nature of our tasks with lack of tactical results are not just merely easy targets for redaction, but also hold less value empirically: unless they are bound within forms. Yes, we can collaborate with form givers, but the tasks are not as separable as say writer and illustrator for either comics or children books. Both produce tangible outcomes that fit mental models of business and consumers. Our role does not. So we need to reach out not for collaboration, but for skills and practice with the areas in which we want to work.