Fundamentals of IMD

I often request that students share their experiences that led them to study Interactive Media, and I thought answering that question would be helpful even from a teacher. So this is my take on the industry and how I got into it.

I have always thrived on change and moving on to whatever is leading edge or the next big thing. Some people in my life have criticized this as instability or simply not wanting to stick with something. I have never accepted that view for myself, as wanting to participate in leading edge activities is just part of who I am. Doing the same thing over an over is boring to me. Even teaching a class the same as I did last quarter is boring, and I think I am not doing my job as our industry changes enough that even every eleven weeks there is something new that can affect a course.

I was working as a manager of a design department for a trade show company when I first began creating web pages for commercial use. I created a site for our company that served as an “index” for the trade show industry. This meant listing and connecting all types of services and companies related to the industry and giving others a means of accessing these businesses. I received email and analized our weblogs of activity and was amazed at users coming to our site from all over the world. Email alone was a busy chore as people contributed information to add to our index. Our site design was on the cover of two industry trade magazines. All of this type of activity was like a magnet that attracted me. The excitement of communicating with people around the globe and doing new things, exploring a new type of media that was changing constantly soon became more interesting that what I had been doing, so I evolved into a webmaster/designer for our company, offering design services for our client companies. After a spell doing this for the trade show company, I went out on my own as a designer/developer. During this time I was approached by The Art Institute and asked to design and put together a web design program. I developed the first courses and became an adjunct instructor, then a full time instructor. And so the story goes.

Interactive media changes for good reasons. The move from HTML to XHTML was significant in that  HTML limited the types of data that could be ported to the web. XHTML, an application of Extensible Markup Language (XML), allows the tags to be generated by the designer/developer which means that any type of data can be addressed. The development of CSS allowed design to take over presentation on the web and make our documents far more efficient and easier for users to read and understand. Web 2.0 represents the most recent transition toward a more user oriented and directed web that established social software and social networking as a major activity for users. Never before did users participate in communities of learning that they actually brought back into their daily lives. The web went from a push information to users media to a pull information that we want specifically, so that we can integrate it into our lives.

I look forward to any new phase or activity on the web that improves it global affect on humanity. We have so much potential to reshape the world now, and to solve problems like poverty and war, if we access the global scope of people coming together for the good of humanity. These kind of powerful concepts and activities keep me excited about integrating web design with everyday life.