Category: General Stuff

Speaking as a Master’s degree holder, i’m biased but I’d say the advantages are primarily:

1) Cross-college connections and alumni networking, especially if you go to a “brand-name” school. Sorry to offend or seem elitist but it’s true.

2) The opportunity to do creative, exploratory projects and re-kindle the imaginative spirit that the working world may have killed off (Like Jack I went straight thru from Undergrad to Grad, for various reasons, but I remember my CMU adviser saying he liked folks who returned to school after spending a few years in the “real world” b/c they were sufficiently angry and jaded and primed to crank out amazing stuff—i’m simplifying a bit ;-)

3) The opportunity to get deep into thinking, reflecting, and diving into the theoretical and intellectual issues that enrich the practice, but we often don’t have time for when we got a 12pm deadline for a client and then a proposal due at 5pm. Spending the year or two doing that deep dive (if you really enjoy it—alot of folks admittedly don’t) may help cultivate a valuable habit that will make returning to the real world a bit more tolerable and satisfying. The intellectual fodder you gain does provide valuable perspective. At least that’s what I tell myself when engineers are clammoring for specs yesterday and I have to design for the PM’s delusional use cases :-)

4) And if you’ve been fumbling around learning it as you go along, grad school offers the chance to learn methods/approaches in a more organized guided fashion (presuming the curriculum is sound and robust!) to push yourself further…and perhaps discover something about yourself you didn’t know!

Also, in terms of career growth, AIGA and IDSA usually publish periodic studies of salary increases, etc. More and more I see job descriptions (like posted on ixda) that require or recommend Master’s…

That all said, in the end it’s a personal choice and has to be measured against your passion and what you really want to get out of the degree. And if it’s right at your stage of life, career, etc.

Rick Poynor‘s article for ID, “Down with Innovation”. This was the source of a recent heated discussion on ixda , and I finally got around to reading it… Whew, sorry that I did. A couple unfair mis-quotes from designers, but what got to me is that it’s just so heavily dripping with cynicism wrapped in layers of hubristic pretentiousness. Hopefully a glass of Russian River Pinot will help me forget it, maybe some HBO too :-)

Now I fully realize there’s a vocal contingency of designers (mostly graphic/visual designers it seems?) insulted by “design thinking” and “innovation” as the new black, but look, just get over it or risk further alienating from broader, diverse design community. Design and business need each other…

(And by the way… Eames, Elliot Noyes, Bel Geddes, Florence Knoll, Paul Rand, Jay Doblin all championed design at the strategic business level waaaaay before design fanboy Bruce Nussbaum started waxing poetically in BusinessWeek about “DESIGN” (throw in shrieking teenage girls in the background for effect))

Coming from CMU, I guess I was really fortunate to have acquired a deeper appreciation for the historical and rhetorical bases of these supposedly nouveau concepts, which I’ve written about in earlier postings for the “public good” in the hopes others would learn and get inspired for themselves. Buchanan, Pat Whitney, Roger Martin, Jeanne Liedtka, Tony Golsby-Smith, Vijay Kumar, have alot to share and contribute to this zeitgiest of design/business. Soak it up! You might learn something! All part of the liberal progressive expansion of the process and practice of design.

Oh yeah, and Poynor’s not a designer. He’s a critic. Boo. As a former mentor challenged me several yrs ago, “Do you wanna be a movie critic or the movie director?”. Until I see evidence that Poynor has a) tried to design something demanding the balancing act of technical innovation and human elegance/simplicity (that’s marketable for a business) or b) showcases an attempt at understanding the authentic relationship among innovation, strategy, and design (beyond the journalistic hype of biz magazines or pretentious “cultural speak”), I’m just gonna keep moving on and pretend I didn’t read his overdone diatribe.

(Actually there was one line in the final paragraph I really enjoyed about the “inherent intelligence of beauty”…will definitely research that further, to ahem, learn its full context and meaning)

I was browsing around my old Adobe files/folders this morning and found this PDF that I had created for the team, as an evangelism artifact, based upon an industry report trumping UX over feature creep.

BeyondFeatures.pdf

In a nutshell:

• More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
• You can’t make things easier by adding to them
• Confusion is the ultimate deal breaker
• Style matters
• Only features that provide a good experience will be used
• Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users
• Unused features can slow you down and hurt ease of use
• Users don’t want to think about technology
• Forget about killer features; focus on killer experience (how it all comes together)
• Less is difficult to achieve, that’s why less is more valuable

Hope others find this to be valuable as well…

Just in case there’s any doubt :-)

The designer adds something important that technical experts may neglect—the ability to bring grace and elegance into forms and devices that are humanly engaging, often exciting and sometimes unexpected. Designers add marvel, and that can make a product more deeply usable, reaching beyond the prosaic or pedestrian.

— Dick Buchanan, Good Design in the Digital Age

Update: Jamin Hegeman, MDes 2008, posted recent thoughts by Buchanan on this topic here: http://jamin.org/archives/2006/why-designers-are-valued/

From the concluding paragraph of my graduate thesis written in 2001 at Carnegie Mellon (advised by Dick Buchanan):

Interaction designers must be concerned with beauty as our environment of human experience becomes rapidly shaped by digital, networked, multifunctional artifacts that influence our attitudes and behaviors. Designers have a profound responsibility to ensure that designed interactions contribute positively to our personal and collective sense of being human. People are fundamentally analog, adaptive, sensual, emotionally conscious beings who possess values, ideals, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions that impact their behavior. It is time for designers to invent products which enable experiences that respect humans for who they are and recognize their potential. Humanizing technological expression is a critical goal and duty of interaction designers, as part of an overall effort to make life satisfying, fulfilling, and meaningful in everyday situations. To combat the ugliness of disruptive, alienating encounters that deprive humans of their ideational, cultural, and personal aspirations is the driving motive for those who strive to create beauty in interaction design.

To elaborate on this from current perspective of having practiced interaction design for the last 7 years in silicon valley…

Aesthetics and beauty matter because if they didn’t, we would be creating something that’s incomplete, not quite fully formed in terms of a truly engaging experience that is delightful, exciting, and memorable. As John Dewey, experience design theorist (from the 1930’s!) phrased it, “an inchoate experience”. It lacks emotion and vitality, reducing the encounter to a meaningless episodic encounter…

In more tangible terms, refined visuals and animations (transitions, motions, dynamic states) communicate a strong sense of interaction and shape the encounter to make it that much more attractive, inviting, and rewarding (or if done poorly, dissatisfying and miserable…and forgettable). This is true for the hardware, software, and netware.

Just as important, the movement of the mouse, the rhythms of clicking and double-clicking (or you prefer, tapping and gliding and waving), how pixels are engaged to result in feedback and action–all that must be thought out to achieve a smooth, graceful, satisfying interaction.

Finally, every artifact that is part of the workflow (designed touchpoints, if you will) should embody a consistent, clear, unifying and reinforcing theme (or brand, voice, style) to amplify the overall quality of engagement. Think of the Apple “purchase to pay to unboxing to usage” flow for an iPod or iMac–seamless, fluid, brilliant. Every aspect fits into an integrative whole, complete and connected.

To read more about my thoughts on beauty/aesthetics for IxD, please see the following related posts:

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Part 1: General thoughts on design aesthetics

Part 2: Interpretations of beauty as a value of user experience

Part 3: Towards an integrative aesthetic experience