Massaging Media Keynote Slides
posted by Rick Webb 
on May 01, 2008 at 10:02 AM
filed under: Creativity, The Internet, and Design
Rick Webb
Co-founder, COO : Boston
topics: Viral Marketing, Metrics and Analytics, User Experience, The Networks and the Internet, and Installations
filed under: Creativity, The Internet, and Design
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at an AIGA conference in Boston called Massaging Media 2. I agreed to do it back in like February or something and I didn’t give it much thought at first. AIGA. Boston. I first became a member of the AIGA in Boston in 1993 or so, so it was a nice thought to give a speech there. I’d do my usual “Designers” speech, about how design isn’t always pretty, and how we don’t care about the art/commerce axis here at all.
But then, I took a work-from-home Friday just before the conference and actually went to the site and checked out the topic of the conference and oo oo! It was a design education conference. With the subtitle “graphic design education in the age of dynamic media.” Oh man! A room full of design educators. Now was my one and only chance to tell them ALL, at once, what was needed. For a man that lives and breathes hiring designers out of school, and has dealt with the educational issues his entire professional life, this was a rare and golden opportunity.
So, here are my slides from the conference. Even as I was giving the speech, though, I got more riled up, and took it further. And here was my big insight that came during the Q&A, so it’s not in the slides:
What we do is hard. It’s engineering, design, art, commerce and software all in one. The educational skillset needed is massive. But there are people out there – thousands of people – who aspire to do it. Not a week goes by where some kid doesn’t email us and ask us how they can get into the industry we’re in.
When you’re 16, and you go to your guidance counsellor and say “I want to be a doctor,” they say “oh, that’s going to be very hard. You’ll have to work really hard, and then go to school for like 7 years, and then work really hard for like three more years.” And then your 16-year-old self says “okay, that’s what it takes to be a doctor. Do I want to do that?” And you answer yes or no, but if you answer yes, then you DO IT. You KNOW it’s going to be hard.
When you’re 16, and you go to a guidance counsellor and say “I want to be a web designer” (and believe me, this does happen), what does your guidance counsellor say? “Hrm.. maybe you should take a drawing class or go to art school.”
We’re about 12 years into this nonsense now, and so far as I can tell, there are about four schools that are doing it even close to right: RIT chief among them. But all the change has come from within, by one or two dedicated leaders at a few schools who willed the change to happen. Twelve years in and the default education for a web creative is still art school with a few tech classes.
We’re still in the Abbot Suger era of Web creative: self-taught go-getters in an era before civilization had the bright idea to actually start architecture schools.
I’d blame the universities, but it’s as much our fault as theirs. We have design organizations, and internet organizations, and advertising organizations, but no web creative organizations. Maybe something like SODA can grow into this, but its mandates seem like they’re perhaps more in like with the AICP rather than for the creatives.
ANYWAY, here are the slides. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since then, and would be curious to hear your thoughts.
1 comment
web deviners may have some architectural or game development or film background, and i dont know if you know about how an art education reveals relationships. it goes the other way too, right? all information automated *organic generative data forming architectural spaces, and then being flexible to programs, systems and space (interactive)* *genetics determining fashion (at this level skin might be a material customized by the wearer)*
but even those ideas will be obsolete once molecular assembly becomes fast, mobile, and easy to use, and given to the consumers. what will that be like? and then connecting consciousness..
getting funding for these types of projects may be part of the creative part, and so is gardening.