At risk of sounding like Uday's hallalujah chorus (yo Uday!), let me press on.
The best thing grad school did for me was FORCE me to get into theoretical areas that I had natural resistances to, and FORCE me to justify and defend the theories that I wanted to hang on to like sacred cows. So let's think a moment about the nature of true innovation. What is it? Look at two other parallel fields that took two different directions, toward theory, toward practice: mass communications, and journalism. Both presume to study one-to-many forms of communication. Both have thriving graduate programs across the U.S. Let's add to that, anthropology (a field that tends to define the leading edge of both theory and practice, it has its head on straight, imho, where the practitioners often engage in the same information-gathering activities as journalists, but more informed by current theory). Journalism stayed rooted in the world of practice and practitioners in its academic study. The actual field was going through a period of extreme conservatism and retrenchment (e.g. big corporations were buying up and consolidating longstanding journalistic institutions, like 100-year-old newspapers). It laid off reporters, closed news bureaus, dumbed down the product, morphed "journalism" into something else altogether. Practice-oriented journalism grad programs took the practice in the field as the status quo, and focused on "excellence" in that practice, sort of like that Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron, where the smart kid had a buzzer go off in his ear every half hour, so as not to give him an "unfair" advantage over the other kids. How do you practice "excellence" when the lowest common denominator approach is SO VERY LOW? You practice becoming excellent at mediocrity! (I've both taught in these journalism programs--and I respect these professors--I was a graduate of such a program as well... and I've worked in newsrooms where excellence, even in your annual review, means striving to reach the highest levels of mediocrity, to become better at mediocrity than anyone else! Can you tell? I don't think a lot of lowest common denominator thinking, in any regard, even in interface design. It's why I migrated to ideas of many-to-many and narrowcasting and long tails) Mass comm programs at least weren't afraid to hire grad professors who weren't ONLY high level practitioners in the field, and were people who devoted themselves to studying the communication problems at hand, instead of following business-driven practice that may be driving the actual product in the wrong direction (imagine, in interface design, if all we were doing these days were web sites with big horizontally-oriented flash splash pages for corporate clients, because they pay the bills, and the advertisers like it, actual USERS be damned? Now step back and realize, this is a true picture of the glossy magazine industry today, and practitioner journalism programs teach magazine journalism as if advertisers' desires were more important than actual magazine readers). Mass comm also put its emphasis in actual research, with good methods, if heavily quantitative and (gasp) modernist. Anthropology is a field that pushes past a lot of those limitations, focusing relentlessly on PRACTICE, and aligning it relentlessly with THEORY. And that is what pushed me out of my traditional modernist assumptions and comfort zone. I did not go willingly. But this is the idea, of practice that works in line with theory, with theory that HAS to be practical, or else it must be condemned as a non-descriptive theory, and rejected. What is the dare? I think it is it to dare to ask any research question and follow the answer wherever it leads, to try to figure out what real users, what real audiences want and need-- in the face of market forces driving toward hardened arteries of convention away from real users. But the dare is also being bold enough to design with vision first, rather than let the audience tail totally wag the dog, because leadership means being able to think and create one step AHEAD of market forces, to innovate informed by the places a line of thought takes you, because that is actually how audiences move. I still don't wholeheartedly embrace all of postmodern theory. But I would have never been forced to wrestle with it, and defend my own focus on practice, without a grad program pushing me out of my comfort zone. But think of what we are actually trying to do. How about defining real as opposed to fake or pseudo-interactivity? Which do you think dominated the field in the late 1990s? How about defining real as opposed to fake or pseudo innovation? To do that means following an idea OR a design wherever it OR your audience leads you, IN SPITE OF market forces that may actually be leading, or even forcing you, in a much more conservative, less innovative direction. Just my 2 cents. Chris On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Uday Gajendar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jun 20, 2008, at 4:37 AM, dave malouf wrote: > >> The theory stuff I think is easy to pick up on one's one. >> > > Hmm, I dunno about that :-). Sure anyone can read a book or several books > and mailing lists and articles that alot of us write or publish even on this > list. > > But it doesn't match the rigor of true in-depth intellectual study and > analysis and, just being challenged by a professor or students *in your > face* to heighten/deepen your understanding of the history, theory, issues, > etc. You gotta absorb it. Live it. Also depends on the domain of theory: > design, pscyh, cog sci, anthro, etc. Whew! To be immersed in a demanding > environment of not only studio activity/critiques but also intellectual > curiosity and expertise, it just can't be underestimated! (and this is at > master's level...doctoral work is a whole other thing!) > > And often the tastiest morsels of theory are shared exclusively in a class > discussion not found anywhere else ;-) > > -uday > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
