Why it Took so Long

Developing the Design Mindset in the Technology Industries

  • Gillian Crampton Smith
Keywords: Computer Industry, Design Mindset, Design Values, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Silicon Valley

Abstract

In the 1970s and ’80s, computer interfaces seemed, even then, crude and unhelpful. “Design values” generally continued to be resisted by the technology industries long after becoming an accepted characteristic of other everyday artifacts. Only recently has the computing industry expressed enthusiasm for the design mindset. The present author, who experienced the transition from letterpress printing through offset litho and Letraset to interaction design, suggests eight reasons why it took so long and how differences in the cultures of design, education, engineering, and business all contributed to this.

First published in AIS/Design. Storia e Ricerche, vol. 4, n. 8, 2016.

Author Biography

Gillian Crampton Smith

Her passion for typography started when as a schoolgirl she learnt to set type by hand and print with an Albion press. At university, she designed and did the artwork for several magazines, Letrasetting headlines and pasting down galleys with rubber cement. She went on to freelance as a graphic designer, spending several years with Times Newspapers and Sight and Sound, the film magazine. The problems posed by photosetting that publication pushed her in 1981 to write a program to do page layout sketches on screen – early desktop publishing. In the 1980s she taught graphic design and typography at London’s St Martin’s School of Art, where she started her post-graduate degree in Computers and Graphic Design. In the 1990s, at the Royal College of Art, she was a professor and director of the MA in Computer Related Design and its associated research group, working in collaboration with UK and US technology companies. In 2001 she moved to Italy as founding director of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and then, with Philip Tabor, started the Interaction Design track at the Iuav University of Venice, where she taught until 2015. She and Tabor are now planning a new master in Interaction Design at H-Campus, the new education institution near Venice. She is an honorary professor at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences and in 2014 was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award.

Published
2022-09-05
Issue
Vol 9 No 16 (2022): A Repertoire for our History of Design
Section
Essays

Copyright (c) 2022 Gillian Crampton Smith

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivates 4.0 international License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).