[Sigia-l] Putting the "Graphic" back with"Designer"(was:thelesser importance of home pages)

[Christopher Fahey]

>> If it ain't bust - why try to break it?
>
> Indeed.
> It's bust.

Stewart's question is excellent: What's broken? In the real world, that is.

The scenario you described, where a person's title as a graphic designer
prevents them from being both willing and able to do anything besides
graphic design, sounds completely ludicrous to me. (The converse, too: I've
never seen a graphic designer with strong interaction design skills be
denied an opportunity to do interaction design because of their title.) It's
a straw man. Honestly, does anything like that really ever happen to you in
your professional experience? And even if it does, would changing that
graphic designer's title to "designer" help at all?

I've *never* run into any problems with job titles. I've known graphic
designers who were pretty darn good at interaction design, and they've been
perfectly willing and able to do that kind of work when the project demanded
it (and it often has). I've met project managers who can do interaction
design flowcharts, software engineers who can make excellent page
wireframes. Calling them all "holistic designers" wouldn't help fix any
problem I know of. 

The solution is to recognize people's personal skillsets and to allow them
to use them on projects where needed, but to let them focus on the skills
they feel most powerful with and that they want to develop further. If they
want to specialize in "graphic design", to master that particular subset of
holistic design, I really don't see what damage can be done by that. If my
team's collective skillset is short on graphic design skills, I know I won't
be looking for a jack-of-all-trades type of person (knowing that that
usually means "master-of-none"). I'll be looking for someone who has
mastered graphic design. If they have other skills, that's even better.

Think of it this way: Erasing the very concept of specialized design fields
like "graphic design" and "interaction design" would make it pretty
difficult to browse a hierarchy of book subjects to find a book about, say,
information architecture wouldn't it? It's like saying we're not humans and
cats and mosquitos - we're all Animals!

-Cf
[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com