The Makings of an Interactive Designer

As an interactive designer I get a lot of questions. What is that? Can you make me a website? Do you really need someone to ‘design’ a website? How do you get into interactive design? The first couple questions are easy. The last isn’t so easy to answer and so I will bestow upon you the origin story to becoming the hero I am to day. (Design puns! I’m so sorry…)

I got my first computer in high school when I was about thirteen. Well behind everyone else. Up until that point I was on the outside looking in at all the fun everyone was having at home. Typing class was a struggle all through junior high because I never used keyboards other than in that class. All my papers were hand written, which took forever, and I would go over to friends houses to do research for projects. But when I finally got a computer I was hooked.

It was a used HP Pavilion from my uncle. I unboxed the used late-90’s something tower and plopped the huge tube monitor on my desk. It was a monstrosity consuming every free real estate my desk had to offer. After everything was set up I connected to the internet. The dial modem started working, Beep beep beep boop boop beep. Ethernet was out but I had no idea what that meant, I was just happy to listen to the growls and pings of anything at this point, Sqreeeeeeeeeeeeee Deedoo deedooo shhhhhhhhhhh, WELCOME, YOU’VE GOT MAIL! Did I mention I had AOL all the way up until 2006?

After what felt like years of weird noises I was logged in to AOL, Shaundude was online. I opened Google and paused… what do I do now!? I mean the world of was at my finger tips. I began to search, pokémon, funny jokes, sweet music, I was searching as fast as my seven words per minute could go, flash games, cool cars, video game cheats. The world was my oyster! I was up until the wee hours of the morning consuming literally any content I could bring up.

I woke up at noonish the next day, fired up my new used monster, Beep boop beep Sqreeeee... I logged in with a mission today. How to make a website. I remember watching other people be really into other websites, I wanted people to use something I made. I sent emails to “web masters” had back and forths between people halfway across the world who probably gave me bad advice. I hacked together a flash site by the end of the day, found free hosting, and published a really cool site where you could interact with this guy I drew wearing headphones. Okay, so it wasn’t that cool, but you could electrocute him and he would turn into a pile of ash. See… now you think it’s pretty cool.

In the end, the reason I feel that I’m so into the psychology and design of the Internet and Technology was because I had to spend so much time observing people interacting with it. Little did I know that my frustration of watching people play games and clicking around the Internet would result in a Jane Goodall type of learning that would fuel my passion of understanding people in their increasingly natural habitat.

I’m always interested in hearing other people’s reasons for designing as well! Please don’t hesitate to share them with me and everyone else. Thanks for reading.