Who is your hero, or who is your mentor? That’s what user experience designer Whitney Hess asked a group of professionals she knows, and she’s been serializing the answers in her blog each Tuesday. I went with the latter, and this week Whitney posted my thoughts on one of my mentors in interaction design, Ryan P. Sims, who was my manager at Hotwire and then later a peer here at Hot Studio (and yes, we only work for companies with the word ‘Hot’ in the name).
Mentorship has played a critical role in the evolution of interaction design. I could have cited personal heroes for Whitney’s piece, like Barrack or Bruce Lee, but like many others in the profession, I didn’t study interaction design in school. For development of design skills, strategic thinking, and understanding of process I relied on my mentors. Most of my colleagues at Hot Studio found their way into this field organically, and their experience is informed by rich backgrounds in other areas like journalism, music, film making, graphic design, and more. I’m willing to bet that each one of them had the help and guidance of a mentor, whether it was a manager (as it was in my case) or a peer, but someone to help them get better at the work they do.
Earlier this year, Kim Goodwin delivered a fantastic keynote to the Interaction 09 conference audience on the importance of mentorship in the field of design. The field has made great strides in proving its own value. Now, when companies build products without the benefit of UCD it’s an exception rather than the norm. Success for the field means an increase in demand for good practitioners. While there are more schools and programs offering course work in interaction design, there’s no substitute for mentorship.
Whitney’s series has sparked my curiosity. Who are your mentors, and do you act as a mentor to someone else?
Interesting to think about…I’ve had a few mentors who were managers, some mentors (what’s a better word? cowo-tor?) who were co-workers and sometimes much younger, and some completely outside our industry. Its nice to have someone light the match that ends up helping you blaze your trail.
There were a few mentors in my life who really put me on a path to where I am today. The first one was my junior high school teacher Witt Halle who got me to love books and exercise my intellectual abilities. Then there were several art teachers in high school who inspired me to push my art abilities further. And finally it was Richard Saul Wurman, my first and last boss, who taught me that the best design served people’s needs, wants and desires and it was much much more than simply an aesthetic exercise.
JJ Toothman, my old manager at NASA, really helped me become the designer (slash front-end developer) I am today.
He saw the potential in hiring a designer who was trained in the world of print to bring a twist to our group’s web work. I really valued his patience and how he always encouraged me to learn. First, HTML &CSS (+ a little PHP)… then that silly proprietary CMS, anything & everything about social media, and then best of all… WordPress.
JJ is currently working at SF startup Ticketfly (check them out!) by adding social web features to their ticketing and events management platform and building a killer WordPress MU platform for hosting music venue websites.
My mentor was Nathan Shedroff. (http://www.nathan.com) He started teaching design to a group of us at vivid studios back in the day. Now he’s teaching a much larger group as chair of CCA’s Design Strategy MBA. Although I’ve been a practicing designer now since 1996 (when I happily switched from project management to design) I still refer to the core principles I learned from Nathan. One of my early favorites was the seven ways of organizing information (adapted from Richard Saul Wurman’s five ways:-).