It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.
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The experience economy - Chris Dixon
This is both welcome news and totally terrifying. Because if you’ve been practicing interaction design for a while (which I guess I have), you know that what qualifies someone for the title “interaction designer” has always been squishy. With this new emphasis from startups, I fear the term will get even more nebulous. There’s an art and science to the discipline - shaped by years of maturing the way we work and guided by thoughtful writing from respected authors, from Wurman to Garret to Saffer and everyone in between. And while there has always been a certain level of mercenary charlatanism to the field of interaction design, I can imagine it’ll only get worse as startups pick up every rock trying to find their now-essential practitioner.
(via Brian Oberkirch)
Maybe it’ll become one of those fields where you just live and die by the quality of your last work, like film director or record producer, where the results have to speak for themselves in terms of measurable improvements in visits or engagement times?
(via secondverse)
