Hi, A few quick and loose thoughts on what is probably the most important topic facing our industry - the education of new talent to actually do the huge amounts of work that are coming across our respective desks:
- Two things that aren't generally taught in either undergraduate or graduate curricula, that I think are more important than any pragmatic hand/eye skill, are passion and confidence. I've witnessed horrendous students - students who might be written off as having "no design talent" - become top in their class due simply to their passion to succeed. Additionally, I'm starting to view confidence as the top skill for interaction designers, as a huge amount of professional time is spent describing, selling, facilitating, and coordinating a design to fruition. - I have seen a shift in education (in all forms of design) from making to thinking, and I think Paul Burke from Thinktiv hit it on the head with his relatively well known infographic: http://interactions.acm.org/content/XV/burke.pdf - we need to educate students at both a masters and an undergraduate level to combine thinking and making. - When I was teaching at SCAD, one of the largest problems we had was the relationship between liberal arts and design. Our strongest masters students, in terms of insight and intellect, were those with an undergraduate degree in liberal arts, yet they often lacked the hand skills to formalize their ideas in any meaningful way. The opposite seemed to be true, too: our masters students who HAD backgrounds in design often lacked the world view to find hidden meaning and draw meaningful connections to disparate or esoteric ideas in culture and in history. - Kevin Conlon, now a VP at Ringling, wrote an extremely meaningful and articulate piece about the future of education for our industry; I really recommend absorbing the depth of his thoughts: http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1083 Thanks, - Jon Kolko Author, Thoughts on Interaction Design http://www.thoughtsOnInteraction.com/ Co-Editor-In-Chief, interactions http://interactions.acm.org/ ________________________________________________________________ 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
