Old School, New School:
Teaching Interaction Design
in Manhattan
Alex Wright

The New York Times | [e-mail]

September + October 2009

interactions

New York City has long ranked as one of the world’s design capitals, but the city’s interaction design community has been slow to find its feet here. Historically, user interface designers first flourished in the cubicle farms of the Bay Area, while many industrial designers plied their trade in the product foundries of the Midwest. Meanwhile, Manhattan designers traditionally worked in the city’s dominant media and advertising industries, with their inevitable bias toward print and motion graphics.

As many agencies and in-house Web teams find themselves tackling increasingly complex websites and applications, designers and their employers are starting to recognize the need for more formal training in the principles of interaction design. So it should come as no surprise that New York’s design schools are tailoring their curricula in response to the shifting demands of the market.

This fall, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) will open the doors on its MFA in interaction design, the first program of its kind in New York and one of the first in the country. Elsewhere around the city, aspiring digital designers can also find a growing range of programs with an interaction design component, including N YU’s vaunted Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Parsons Communication Design and Technology Program, and a new dual master’s degree program in digital arts and library science at Pratt Institute.

The rising popularity of these programs suggests that interaction design is gaining professional credibility in the New York City’s design community, but their differing approaches also raise useful questions about the role of formal education for interaction designers. What subjects should be taught? What is the right mix of “hard” and “soft” skills? And perhaps most important, where is the right balance between professional training and

creative freedom? While each of these programs tries to juggle these sometimes conflicting priorities, each has a particular educational philosophy that shapes its approach.

The new SVA program tilts toward an applied model of education. Founded by designer and author Steven Heller, the program has been taking shape for the past year under the guidance of incoming program chair Liz Danzico. “The idea came because I felt there was a gap between print and Web design and designers,” says Heller. “I knew that the paradigms of print would not translate verbatim to interaction, but I wanted to have some kind of level field to start. “

In a first step befitting a program founded on user-centered principles, Heller and Danzico started by interviewing the school’s prospective “users”: creative directors, principals, recruiters and other user experience professionals likely to hire SVA graduates. For Heller, the interviews helped him understand the cultural divide between visual designers and interaction designers. “Frankly, the biggest surprise was how little graphic design was even considered in the hiring of interaction ‘ people,’” he says. “I learned that it is important to build consciousness for a new kind of design process and aesthetic.”

In an effort to bridge that gap, the SVA curriculum tries to give students a grounding in design fundamentals, while helping them cultivate the soft skills so often required in the modern workplace: strategic thinking, entrepreneurship, ethics, and communicating with clients. “Designers need to be rhetoricians, able to articulate the value of their work,” says Danzico. They must also be “improvisers” who can work with emerging paradigms like gesture, physical computing, and other still-emerging forms.