Advice to today’s digital design students

This evening I had the fun pleasure to attend the local IxDA NYC. It was great little homecoming for me as I co-founded the chapter here in NYC some 13 years ago and left the community about 9 years ago.

After the event, I announced that I’m hiring. As the only one hiring in the room I was innundated with a lot of longing faces, the vast majority of which I knew was way to under qualified for the position (A Senior Product Designer role).

Many of those wishing a piece of my time were students. And they of course asked for jobs as graduation is approaching soon, or for internships and unfortunately I wasn’t in a position right there to help. But I did give out my contact information if people wanted me to review their portfolio or connect on LinkedIn or whatever.

One woman immediately followed up asking what should she be learning if I was to be hiring her in some future circumstance. I appreciated the foresight of her question very much and took the time to write the below. I liked it enough that I felt it would be good to share w/ you all. It was written as an email so it is a little choppy, but I think as a quick blurb about what it would mean to work in my world — Information Technology (Tech for Tech), complex workflow, and intricate object models — this is what you would need. My caveat is always, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), b/c different contexts and different hiring managers will have different opinions and attracted to different types of people. What follows is what I look for and would want to focus on in a formal education program.

I think the three skills that I look for above and beyond the usual “ux design” stuff are the following:

* Information Architecture

* Service Design

* Visual Thinking

I deal in very wicked problem spaces of intricate solution spaces where the value chain from purchaser to value receiver are separated from one another by 3–4 links in a chain. The stacks of technology that are being combined together that somehow need to be protected from the customer, but made available to the end-user means that a designer needs to be able to dissect these systems, explain them, and reconfigure them. A great book to help at that very topic is “How to Make Sense Out of Any Mess” by Abby Covert. Such clarity and utility right away in a small (powerful) package.

But you’ll also need to be able to prototype: frame, paint, code, and validate, too. I expect code for your generation to be second nature a this point regardless of what major you are (English > Physics). Code literacy is just a requirement of life at this point.

As for certifications [the student asked for these specifically], I’m not a big fan of them. But I will point out that the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design is running a summer workshop series this year in NYC. http://ciid.dk/education/summer-school/ciid-summer-school-2017-nyc/

I did a version of it in Copenhagen a few years ago and loved it! CIID is such a special institution.

SVA has its own version and I’ve heard great things about it, but they don’t hold a space in my heart like CIID does.

What advice would you give a student today about to go out and get a job? What is yoru context and for your context what would you recommend to focus on, or highlight in a portfolio?

Another student spoke to me about portfolio issues. The main issue is that everyone is giving him conflicting criticism. This one says there is too much text. This one says there is not enough. Another one says they want to see research, and finally, a last one says they don’t care about research.

I felt so bad for him. He is at the center of the mess that my generation has made (or more accurately didn’t take the time to fix, even though we saw it right in front of us).

I had two suggestions for him:

1. Go all the way and create an online “responsive” portfolio.
   I remembered this portfolio of a copywriter. And thought just like he changed his content dynamically in real time based on a quality of tone, why can’t an industrious product design student create a responsive portfolio wherein they send a URL w/ a #hashtag in the URL that tells the page which version of a portfolio to present all based on the same content, based on your best read of the job description, but then also show the option to change the portfolio layout with some sort of slider (or two).
2. Just create one HUGE portfolio in PDF. But when you send it, just pick and choose the “right” pages for this instance. When you go in and present you have 4 stories lined up in the front, but you are ready with further details on those 4 stories but also more stories ready to go if the interviewer wants to talk about something in further detail or have specific example.

It has been fun to get back into that “developmental” mode again. Even w/ my team I feel warmly welcome by them and I’m glad tonight to pass on some of that great karma forward.

I hope some found these two stories useful.

I’d love to hear what people think about any of this.