Hasta La Ideas

Hilversum, the Netherlands, where interaction14 will take place

Arguably for any discipline to advance in its practice it needs to have a solid means for educating its future practitioners. This is doubly true when the demand for that discipline is at a pace that is far exceedingly the rate at which practitioners can be “created” otherwise. In 2009, Jared Spool saw this reality coming. He led an amazing panel at the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) annual conference, Interaction09, in Vancouver, British Columbia. The panel was called “Hiring the Next Generation of Designers,” in which Jared asked, “Where are the next 10,000 interaction designers going to come from?” While in most academic terms four and a half years is not very long, in the digital design world it is a very long time ago.

For me, the Interaction09 conference was on the heels of a major moment in my own life. I moved away from practice and into Education because, like Jared, I felt the pressure that was and continues to be on interaction design education. And for over four years, I led the interaction design program at a prestigious Art & Design college, the Savannah College of Art and Design. During that time, I felt the pressures on interaction design education. I was trying my best to make students that were better than what industry needed and at every turn my successes felt limited to only a small selection of outstanding students. Students who brought the soft skills they needed to me and whom I just curated a collection of knowledge and tools to make them better prepared and those that came ready left ready getting hired into positions directly out of school at organizations like frog, Adaptive Path, Philips, Siemens, Smart Design and IBM.

But through all this success, it was still clear to me that there was a growing disparity between what I was offering and a what a large number of employers were looking for in their Junior employees. We have entered an industry that is increasingly unforgiving compared to design careers in the past. I felt at odds with much of my peers who were still 100% in industry. I started to look for ways to engage industry through my connection with the IxDA. Right after the 2009 conference, I started a conversation with people both in education and in industry interested in helping me start a competition geared towards highlighting how awesome both students and design education institutions were. We called it the International Interaction Design Student Competition. We had about 15 judges, of whom eight made it to the main conference and of whom five were part of a panel of “mentors” for the finalists, who were all given a free trip to Savannah, GA, for Interaction10. They were given a challenge to design something in a short time and find ways to present their skills and mindset to the community of attendees as a whole. The event was a success in so far as it got a new conversation happening among industry and design educators.

(more…)