A big source of confusion is equating what you can do as being the same as what you know. Many people will advocate devoting all your energies into creating a portfolio so you can demostrate you can do certain things. Showing is always powerful, but has its limits.
In my experience, what you can show as an individual in a portfolio is not always a reliable guide to what you can contribute to a diverse team on a complex project. Portfolios showcase individual efforts, and tend to be either prosaic -- one person alone can only do something a given complexity, or highly conceptual -- some future idea that may be unbuildable as a practical matter, even if the idea shows great creativity. Real world design may involve many dozens of people contributing to the interaction design, even if one person claims the credit as the "lead designer." Once you rely on portfolios to show group effots, you aren't really showing, you are telling, since it isn't possible to unpack the collaboration just by looking at it. The value of theory, or better still, the accumulated evidence of behavior, is that we can leverage insights from what we ourselves have't had the possibility to work on directly. We have reached the point in IxD where specialization is required to do most work that is interesting and path breaking. Teams of dozens of people with various skills -- understanding aesthetics, people and computer programming, are required. What one specializes in and how one contributes should be determined by which of these things one is most interested in. Personally, I am interested most in people, not art or technology. For me, beauty is fitness to purpose, not anything visual. People can love ugly looking things, and I think that's great. So when thinking about the value of portfolios, ask "where are the people?" Hopefully there will be more to show than a one-page persona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31165 ________________________________________________________________ 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
