In my experience, American design firms seem more likely than technical firms to have organized winter internships. (Can't say I know why.) One (off the top of my head) such winter internship is that of Smart Design: http://www.smartdesignworldwide.com/contact/jobs/sf.php?id=31 but of course I'm sure there are many, many others. Good places to find IxD internship/job postings are the CHI-JOBS mailing list (through the ACM), the LinkedIn groups for User Experience and Interaction Design Association, Coroflot, 37signals/Signal vs. Noise, Good Experience and the archives of the various IxDA/IxD mail lists. I mention archives because often times a firm will only think to post to this list one particular year - but that doesn't mean the internship isn't offered in later years. ;)
A caveat: I've pointed you to sources for both design firm jobs and in-house team/technical sector jobs. Working for a design firm and working as an in-house interaction designer at Google or a technical startup can be two entirely different experiences (and, indeed, often attract very different candidates.) I think it's worth thinking carefully about which type of environment appeals to you before spreading yourself too thin applying to both technical and design firms. Not to say you can't apply to both (and even have a career that jumps between the two), but as you noted, interaction design is insanely broad - and because it's so broad, companies are going to ask you not just "Why Interaction Design?", but "Why Us?". Oh, and on that topic, one thing I underestimated when I moved into Interaction Design from Computer Science was the importance of the cover letter to answer "Why Us?" convincingly. I find a lot of good job leads just in my normal routine of reading things I find interesting in the field. As I'm learning about things, I invariably take a look at the authors (who are often fairly estabilshed in something I find really interesting) and say "How did they get where they are?" You put their name into Google, and you see in their biography that they got a degree in Foo-ology and worked at BarFirm before doing what you find so interesting. 95% of the time, BarFirm is some lead I've already looked at, but the other 5% BarFirm winds up being some obscure but really cool player in the field that might just happen to be advertising on their blog for a summer intern. (Seriously, it happens - usually when you least expect it.) Let's see....3 months of free time...working for a firm or company is great, especially if it's a firm that's really looking out for your development as a designer and a person. It's also the "safest" thing you can do (though as Susan notes, it's becoming less and less safe to play it "safe"...) That said, regardless of who's paying the bills, I think the most important thing is to design *something,* anything. Ideally, something you find interesting enough to keep plugging on, even when your first ideas fail. It doesn't matter as much what, or for who, as long as you're practicing new techniques (for both design and prototyping) and thinking about design and the world around you. It's absurdly cliche, but absurdly true. Let's say worst case scenario, no one hires you before your break begins. In your new-found free time, find a problem you find interesting and try to solve that problem through interaction design. Sketch in the park. Talk to your friends and do your own ethnography on, oh, say, dating. (People LOVE to discuss dating with you - I did this for a while and nearly wound up starting an online dating company just from the inertia of it all.) If you get a seed of an idea, iterate it on paper, and then muck around in some program or language to try to prototype it. Nothing may come out of the first few dozen attempts at this, but if nothing else you'll gain the ability to gracefully bounce back and forth between design phases, and will have a lot of interesting experiences to talk about once you land that interview. Most importantly, DOCUMENT YOUR WORK. Buy a scanner or sketchbook for your sketches, a notepad for your thoughts and a camera for your ethnography if you don't have those things already. It's one thing to be able to explain an end design, and quite another to be able to *show* someone the steps and thoughts you took to get there. You can always throw notes and sketches out if you decide you don't need them, but you can never recreate them after the fact if you decide you do. I guess I'm sort of trying to downplay the importance of any particular internship, and putting more emphasis on the importance of just practicing design (be it with real clients or for your friends/neighbors.) A great internship will give you wonderful sets of prompts and let you explore great techniques every day - but if that gig with IDEO falls through, the more you do things like this and design, the more you realize that all the design prompts you need to succeed exist all around you. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46549 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
