August 26, 2006 - Required personal skills for interaction designers

    Successful interaction designers are organization hubs, they have to interact with variety of people across organization. Therefore an important and unavoidable part of interaction design is politics. I don't think political skills are taught in design schools. To make matters worse, not every personality type is adept in social interactions.

    "First, Break All the Rules" (good book) describes environment in well-run companies. It touches on, but doesn't cover in detail internal politics, especially those in the not-so-well run companies, where managers do not read insightful managerial books. The topics touched upon in the book are importance of personal status and relationships.

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    Let's see... The useful personality traits for interaction designers: analytical, creative, socially adept (communicative, assertive, amicable, perceptive of group dynamics) + technically knowledgeable. Taken singly these personal traits can be found with relative ease. All together, in one body - not very common combination. Moreover this is the same infrequent combination of personal traits often found among entrepreneurs - a drain on the pool of available employable designers.

    Hm. Add good sense of humour and you have someone almost good enough to take out for dinner and long walks on a beach...
