I am constantly frustrated by being "peerless" in terms of interaction design. When I talk about how things are broken, I get blank stares. People rabidly defend the status quo. Most interaction designers are button-twiddlers.
What keeps me sane is A) knowing that there are a few people out there, even if I don't talk to them, who must be on the same page. I use their software and it doesn't make me want to puke.
And B) I have a group of friends who understand me. None of them are interaction designers or even heavily invested into creating software (with the exception of my equally crazy husband), however.
I think this actually helps them get me, because they're not chockful of preconceived notions. I can tell them, "Imagine if you could..." and they go "Yeah! And what if...?" -- my friends who are more nerdy, about either ui or code, go "But x already does y." (Which isn't even remotely what I was talking about.)
It's like the people who are actually in my field(s) think in terms of Concrete Nouns and merely use those Nouns Concrete in various recombinated forms, so if you try to come up with something that doesn't already exist, their brains break, and they barf out "But, ...".
Pardon the self-absorbed rant, but the downside to this is that not only am I lacking good outlets for discussing and growing my ideas, I'm lacking good outlets for smart constructive criticism. And I miss that.
I am constantly frustrated by being "peerless" in terms of interaction design. When I talk about how things are broken, I get blank stares. People rabidly defend the status quo. Most interaction designers are button-twiddlers.
What keeps me sane is A) knowing that there are a few people out there, even if I don't talk to them, who must be on the same page. I use their software and it doesn't make me want to puke.
And B) I have a group of friends who understand me. None of them are interaction designers or even heavily invested into creating software (with the exception of my equally crazy husband), however.
I think this actually helps them get me, because they're not chockful of preconceived notions. I can tell them, "Imagine if you could..." and they go "Yeah! And what if...?" -- my friends who are more nerdy, about either ui or code, go "But x already does y." (Which isn't even remotely what I was talking about.)
It's like the people who are actually in my field(s) think in terms of Concrete Nouns and merely use those Nouns Concrete in various recombinated forms, so if you try to come up with something that doesn't already exist, their brains break, and they barf out "But, ...".
Pardon the self-absorbed rant, but the downside to this is that not only am I lacking good outlets for discussing and growing my ideas, I'm lacking good outlets for smart constructive criticism. And I miss that.