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so i’m waiting to get a table at some nonspecific local neighborhood dive. it’s nice and sunny out and fall has started and we’ve all got hoodies on. in short order, adam asks me: “so what is it that you… do?”
“well uh i’m an interaction designer…”
“right. what do those do?”
“basically we try to make technology easier for people to use.”
“really! so you design interactions.”
“yes.
pause.
“if i said that i was a designer of interactions, and not an interaction designer, would it have made more sense?”
“yes!”
cask-strength facepalm. fwiw apparently he thought “interaction design” meant a specific kind of design process that was somehow more hands-on? but like, putting all the semantic hair-splitting about our profession aside, i feel sort of like i always need to explain my career to other people in what amounts to five or six paragraphs of canned manifesto - which i have down by now, but hoo boy does it sound pretentious and awkward to come off like you just invented your own career path and now you live in a city where there are, like, five of you. maybe this would be easier in san francisco, where there appears to be more interaction designers than homeless people about 15% of the time. maybe it would be easier if i just said “usability” which is a tiny subset of interaction design. but i have found it easiest to simply say “web designer” which both 1) completely isn’t what i do at all, ever, under any circumstance and 2) even if it were, interaction design applies to the web just as much as it does industrial design or software engineering, and so it’s equally disingenuous to zoom in on only a tiny part of the proverbial techno-fustigatory venn diagram.
but it punts, right? and it satiates the asker, because everybody has their own vision of what it means to be a web designer by now. i say this to construction workers on the el platform, or the 50yo waitress at my favorite greasy diner, or the panaderia baker under the blue line, and they get it: they know what a web site is, they know that people make them. it doesn’t matter the particulars of what that all involves, but if they want to know specifically what it is that i do they can ask and i can tell them that i do usability, information architecture, content strategy, etc.
so i guess i’m writing this because i’m curious whether it’s okay to like start from the blanket term “web design” as a catch-all at most parties or whatever, and then if they want to ask more questions they can? or that this entire post is a tacit confession that i suck ass at small talk. you can probably read it one of those two ways.
