Discussion about the IDSA

Richard Kuchinsky,

Sorry, been away from this thread for a few days. I appreciate your helpful opinions and accept your assertion that you aren’t angry. You have to excuse me for seeing your statement " but I think the attitude that IDSA is so great and infallible is part of the problem" as being something less than benign. As I said earlier, no one at IDSA thinks we are great and infallible. We appreciate everyone’s interest in improving IDSA and would love to have you become involved in doing so. We do have Canadian members, just as we have European and Asian members.

George

Adding to the following posts.

RE: “… yet I firmly believe that Interaction Design is, in-fact, Industrial Design…” (Chris Gielow)

My design education was in interaction design & I’ve been a practicing interaction designer since the early 90’s working in tech. Interaction design is not industrial design. Its role is architectural. It does embraces ID as it does ethnography, design research, graphic design…etc. Interaction design is parallel to film direction or architecture. I’d be happy to discuss this further off-thread. I draw these parallels based on the required rigor in education & training, the required breath of multi-disciplinary knowledge, and the way interaction design collaborates and lead other creative, science, engineering, and business peers in a team. Despite having no peers when I first joined, I found IDSA (mostly IDSA-NY) enriching & accommodating as a design association. And despite the lame 20th century name, IDSA brings under its umbrella many design and non-design disciplines. Other associations I belong to cover similar disciplines but done are creative centric. And I am happy to contribute to the evolution that IDSA (and its investments in education) is making so that interaction designers are the future key drivers of the organization. I hope you will be interested and enthusiastic in contributing.

RE: “…individuals seem like we can advocate far more effectively…“…Right now IDSA is a $300 subscription to a bad magazine. There has to be a lot more to it than that…” (Michael DiTullo)

There is alot more. In my experience, professional organizations like IDSA are far more effective than individuals because it functions like an open source platform for its members to contribute & change, so everyone evolves & thrives together.

Highly effective professional orgs do 3 things:

(1) Provide legitimacy through licensing/accreditation for members i.e. definition of qualifications & legal responsibilities, and assuring high standards of practice
(2) Define core values of the profession and promote them e.g. education, job training, outreach, & political advocacy
(3) Provide community & content for members to foster collaboration, & extend their professional friendships/networks
Community & content: (a) Supports members to mentor educators, students, and new professionals; (b)Support members in networking; (c) Develop programs/resources for members to improve skills and knowledge; (d) Support members through different career stages; (e) Be the historical archive of the profession

While item 1 is a non-starter as far as IDSA is concerned (as well as AIGA, HFES, SGICHI, IxDA…etc), IDSA has been super aggressive and show continous improvement in terms of effectiveness in 2 & 3. Since my student days, I’ve always believed IDSA is valuable because I’ve always pay for it myself. To me, IDSA is a $300 opportunity to add to the source code and create benefit to my peers and future peers.

I would be happy to discuss how I can help you contribute. Bill

I am interested. I’d like to start by understanding the value proposition for IDSA and for Interaction Designers (who are already aligned-with and served-by other associations.)

PS: I would like to hear more about why you don’t think IxD is a subset of ID. Ironic that we’re on opposite sides of that debate! Let’s take it to the Interaction Design forum.

I have waited a while to enter this fray, plus I was enjoying myself in Belize for 8 days and wasn’t ready to get into it.

First, I will lay out my current"jobs that aren’t my real jobs":

  1. moderator for Design in Asia forum for Core77
  2. member of DMI
  3. commenter in certain groups of Linked In, especially Design Thinking
  4. so many different positions in IDSA, that I don’t feel like typing them all here.

I do the above things for different things for different reasons. Core77 gives me immediate feedback as to what is going on in some areas of the profession. I volunteer to do some things for it but it also gives me a lot of content (usually not deep but broad)

DMI, I currently only take from, except for the money I give to be a member. It gives me deep knowledge in a certain area.

Linked In gives me a chance to both hear and speak about topics and get feedback from people both inside and outside the profession. This has been invaluable.

IDSA has allowed me to develop as a person, both professionally and personally. I have gotten tremendous benefit from the networking and the conferences. IDSA contacts have also helped me to find jobs and I have helped others find jobs. I also work to make connections between people who could benefit from the connection. But that is a tiny part of what I have gotten. By volunteering to elected positions I have learned valuable management skills, especially when it comes to convincing people who are not being paid to do something. after being on the Board I learned that IDSA is open to the thoughts and directions of the members and that we can choose the directions that IDSA goes into by doing it. I created the International Liaison Officer positions and became the first one for Asia. I have built a dialogue between Asia and the US. I am now writing an new position description that will allow me to build relations between IDSA and the US Government. Where else can you write your own job description and make differences in the profession. IDSA gives only a little if you only give a little. It gives a lot if you give a lot.

I guess the long and short of what I am saying is you have to look for balance in what you want in life. Choose your destiny and find the outlets that allow you to meet it. Don’t expect all avenues to give you the same thing in life. That would be boring.

Thanks for killing the thread Tim! :wink: Just kidding.

See, I never got any of those things from IDSA. I just don’t see how they engage professionals under 35. There it is, the age thing. I only have one more year to be under 35, so maybe next year it will all be clear to me…

YO, I think they do have the attention of in-school students, (particularly when accredidation is under review) they just can’t retain them as members while they’re just starting out as professionals. keeping that 1 percent of “content generators” as active members untill the 35 year olds come back into the fold…

and I think there’s an ingrained designers desire to see a fully integrated solution. one fully flexible all encompasing recource for everything. Tim’s right to imply we need to let that go.

I think it’s really that mid-career designer that IDSA needs to go after next. this is where skills are a given, and some of that content/guidance of how to get to the next level is missing. (of course, this is where the real valuable $tuff is too).

senior designers/directors don’t need alot of support from within Design, this is where DMI and business school comes in.

I agree, which is why I quickly changed my post to say “professionals” under 35. Maybe I’m just not a joiner, because I was frankly leery of it as a student. The kids that seemed hyper active in the chapter seemed more concerned with political maneuvers and getting an A on every project rather that mastering the skill set and pushing boundaries. this may be just my isolated experience to be fair.

So, an innocent, fact finding question. Not leading here at all.

How many members are in IDSA?

How many of those are industrial designers by their own definition?

How many industrial designers are there in the United States?

(I just got these numbers from Clive Roux, IDSA’s Executive Director):

IDSA has just over 2400 members, but I should preface that with all Associations memberships are down and tend to do so in times of recession. Similarly, we believe AIGA’s numbers are also down, but we’re not exactly sure.

From our most recent membership survey at the end of last year, 70% are Industrial or Product Designers. 30% are related professions such as Design managers, interface designers, design researchers, ethnographers, model makers… almost all are designers except for a small percentage who are affiliate members.

As for designers in the USA, this is a tough one. No one has a definitive answer on that. Estimates range from 15-50,000, but Clive tends to think it is narrowly around 15,000 and broadly defined around 30-35,000.

w

Thanks Warren. I was just curious (I like fun math).

So that means there are about 1700 (I rounded up) Industrial designers, putting it at about 5-11% of total. 5% being if the total number of industrial designers in the United States is closer to 35,000 and 11% being if the number is closer to 15,000. I excluded the 50,000 number because I too feel that is high. I’m guessing it is closer tot he 35k zone though.

I know AIGA has a lot more members, but it might not have a much higher percentage as there tend to be many more graphic designers by definition. Just think of how many local GD spots their are at every little local newspaper and such. I’m not sure if there is a way to figure that out.

My point being that I think 5-10% is a pretty good proportion considering the cynical bunch of non-joiners designers tend to be! I say that with love and affection as one.

One place that I feel like we’re really missing is with the young grads… There’s this assumption that until you become a seasoned professional, you don’t have anything to contribute and that really isn’t the case. We need their ideas, enthusiasm and their energy… I think it’s a shame that such a small percentage actually join after graduating, even considering the reduced membership dues…

Coroflot is great, but your competing against hundreds, or thousands of portfolios… but it’s the candidate’s personality that makes someone “fit” into an office’s culture. To get that connection, you still need face time and what better way to do that then to help to organize and event for IDSA?

I was talking to a student the other day about what she was going to during the summer for a job. I asked her if she had contacted any of the IDSA members she met while organizing a portfolio review and she was like, “I didn’t think I was ALLOWED to do that!” And she was amazed when I told her that we were EXPECTING her to do that–that’s what it’s all about… There are opportunities for those who are willing to look for them.

w

How do you all (specifically people not steeped in IDSA), think it could be made better understood that this is not a closed society but a one waiting for connections? No BS here, I am really curious for peoples input.

It really is a fruit ripe for the picking but it is obvious that most people don’t get that per Yo and Warren’s comments above.

I’m thinking that could be a new thread… Michael, when are you back from Aruba so we can get the IDSA discussion board started?

done… from the beach even!

Nice! Thanks!

w

another thread asks the question about Core cancelling the Creative Seed blog.
here we have an example of quality content targeting the young designer not succeeding, perhaps a lesson for IDSA?

It is interesting. I always thought CS had great content, but functionally, I just don’t think people go to coroflot to read a blog, they go there to post and look at work.

I’m not familiar with that one… What was it?

I still maintain that a great deal of this has to do with what we are teaching our design students and how they transition into professional practice. I wish there were more professionals who would take the time to reach out to students before they graduate to help them with this transition and share some of their insights about where to begin and how to plug into the community.

w

sure, but how do you convince a busy professional to commit more time/effort to better the profession/community?
This has always been the achillies heel for IDSA.
I’d like to see accreditation require co-op/Internships for graduation. Getting some work in exchange for professional guidance in the feild is the best way to re-connect.

No Spec,

I am glad you opened the accreditation can of worms again. I was pushing for it several years ago but ran into a big wall. Most people at the time could only this as a test for the skills of design instead of seeing the bigger picture that it could be training and giving credit for learning things like a) the business of design, b) design thinking at a strategic level, etc.

I agree that a strong accreditation aspect would be good. As you have to set this state by state, if you follow the AIA and engineering methods, this will take many years to get approved and in production. I am not saying we should not look at other methods, but I do think having a legal aspect to this will be the only way to make this ultimately succeed. Now that more and more industrial designers are being forced into the litigious aspects product development this may be the time to bring this back up. The reason i say this is that accreditation would be needed in order to get proper liability insurance, like doctors have.

Tim, do you want to spin this into a new topic for our newly-minted discussion board?

w