dialog u e Steven Heller in conversation

The People Behind Print

An oral history at 70.

Confession: The questions are loaded. But when I talked to Martin Fox—who ran Print for
almost 40 years—and many of his collaborators about their years here, we ended up with a
patchwork of memory that’s a unique testament to the magazine.

Marti n Fox An d r e w Kn e r C ar o l S t e ve n s J u li e L a sky S t e ve n B r owe r J oyc e R u t t e r K aye

editor, 1963–2003 art director, 1962–1999 associate art director, 1963–81; associate editor, 1989–90; art director, 1999–2002; managing editor,
managing editor, 1981–92; senior editor, 1990–91; creative director, 1998–2003; editor,
executive editor, 1992–97 managing editor, 1991–98 2002–04 2003–08

STE VEN HELLER
Print contributing editor, author, co-chair of the
Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts
What is Print’s most defining characteristic?
martin fox: Its willingness to go beyond
narrowly defined borders of graphic design
and extend coverage to areas that might not
relate directly.
andrew kner: When a new issue of Print ar-
rives, opening it is always an adventure.
Any topic was fair game for us. . . . It was sort
of a liberal arts education for designers.
carol stevens: Its clarity and broad scope,
both editorially and visually.
rose deneve (managing editor, 1969–80):
Print has always prided itself on being more
than a pretty face. This thoughtfulness is, I
think, what makes Print unique.
julie lasky: Its lack of boundaries.
joyce rutter kaye: Print explores the layers
beneath the surface of design intelligently
and beautifully.
todd pruzan (associate editor, 1998–99;
managing editor, 2003–06): Its authority.
Print is America’s design magazine of record,
the media source that best and most thor-
oughly explains why things look the way they
look and why the way things look is not
merely significant but often transformative.
jeremy lehrer (associate editor, 2000–
02; senior editor, 2002–06): Its voice can
be at turns philosophical, humorous, literary,
witty, dry, straightforward, informative.
The magazine has always had a colorful rain-
bow of voices and moods.
steven brower: Print has always had a dis-
tinct voice and point of view. Years before
I met Marty, Andy, and Carol, I felt I already
knew them.
How would you describe what Print became
during your tenure?
fox: When Print began in 1940, it was
very much printing- and typography-orient-
ed, geared to professional typographers,
printers, and typophiles. Gradually, it expand-
ed its coverage of advertising and promotion
design, whose creators more and more became
its primary readers. During my tenure, Print
increased its coverage considerably in these
areas. We also made a regular point of going
out into the street—that is, covering graphic
design as it actually affected people in their
daily lives.
kner: We expanded the design universe to
include media that was not in existence
70 years ago. The areas of interest to design-
ers have expanded, and so has Print.
stevens: I don’t think it ever forgot its mis-
sion to report on classic design practice,
but it didn’t ignore the avant-garde, especial-
ly when the use of some cutting-edge device
was appropriate.
lasky: My tenure at Print coincided with the
rise of the Mac and the explosion of self-
taught designers, desktop publishing, photo
manipulation, and a hundred zillion fonts.
Print became the somewhat dazed chronicler
of that revolution.
kaye: When I started at Print as managing
editor in 1998, the magazine was focused
mainly on print work, with a smattering of

portr a its by b e r n d s c h i f f e r de c k e r
motion graphics and web design, and spoke
mainly to graphic designers. As the field
began to encompass new forms of media and
embrace a more multidisciplinary approach,
we expanded the scope of our coverage
greatly. We began speaking to a much broader
audience than ever before. At last, I didn’t
have to explain what Print was—suddenly,
everyone knew.
brower: It became eclectic and idiosyncratic.
I wanted the spreads to be as interesting
as the stories. I wanted to match its singular
voice with the visual equivalent.
pruzan: The public’s understanding of how
media works has changed drastically over
the past decade, and during the years I was at
Print. Much communication has lost its
power to shock and its permission to cherish.
Yet Print still finds ways to startle, to prove
that our visual world still contains many
mysteries worth exploring and explaining.
kristina dimatteo (art director, 2006–
09): Its intention didn’t change so much
as how we approached, communicated, and
pushed the boundaries of our content.
What was the most memorable issue or piece
of work that you saw?
fox: I would hesitate to assign the term
“most” to any of it.
kner: When we started the Regional, we
were astounded to see the variety of work out
there and the strength of regional charac-
teristics by not showing the work by media.
stevens: Leo Lionni, Cipe Pineles, and
Josep Pla-Narbona.
lasky: The infamous Tibor Kalman/Joe
Duffy debate about graphic design’s responsi-
bility, the infamous Massimo Vignelli/Ed
Benguiat debate about type design’s responsi-
bility, and Michael Dooley’s tour-de-force
send-up of Emigre, Step-by-Step, Communication
Arts, Metropolis, and, yes, Print in his “profile”
of a donut maker, published in the 1994
parody issue. That issue remains one of the
proudest accomplishments of my career.
kaye: Paula Scher, Abbott Miller, Rick
Valicenti, David Carson, Fred Woodward,
Janet Froelich, Marian Bantjes, Andrea Dezso,
Stefan Sagmeister, Wieden & Kennedy,
Maira Kalman, Christoph Niemann, Laurie
Haycock, Scott Makela. And Dave Eggers—
his influence resonated during that time.
brower: I always loved the theme issues.
And I loved the old, large format.
dimatteo: For me, it’s the whole history of
iconic artists who have graced the covers—
there were some true masters through Print’s
history. And the first-person narrative essays
were a lovely opportunity to do something
special and/or make a statement.
What was the most controversial Print feature?
fox: The Sex Issue, for obvious reasons.
Anyone who thought that Print readers were
all liberal-minded types when it came to
discussing sex got a dose of reality when that
issue came out. The indignation and out-
right fury it provoked was startling. Clearly,
sex is an uncomfortable and distasteful
subject to deal with for many people in this
country, graphic designers included.
stevens: The Comics Issue. The cutting-edge
comix artists complained that we paid
too much attention to superhero art, and the
superhero artists complained that we had
too much callow, kinky stuff. Art Spiegelman
didn’t like any of it.
deneve: A piece I wrote on an invitational
industrial-design show at MoMA. The show
was mounted during a time of intense
public debate around social and environmen-
tal issues. It included some very stylish
furniture and high-concept environments, a
lot of it made from plastics. The end of the
article called into question the entire premise
of hosting an invitational design show
that was in essence an exercise in conspicuous
consumerism. MoMA wasn’t too happy, but
the article got people talking.
kaye: The whole Sex Issue, by far. We were
motivated by covering an area of design that
the design press had previously avoided. And
we had a lot of fun doing it. At the time, I
was the only female editor on staff, so you can
imagine the red faces at those article meetings.
brower: I designed the cover for Print’s sec-
ond parody issue, featuring the Oliveri
Toscani Benneton photo of a priest kissing a
nun with a Groucho mask, which received
complaint letters and cancellations.
pruzan: Nothing holds a candle to the Sex
Issue. Dozens of readers took the time to
complain about the issue—and then to boast
that they’d thrown it away without opening
it, rendering an honest, open dialogue about
we had a lot of
fun doing it. at the
time, i was the
only female editor
on staff, so you
can imagine the
red faces at those
article meetings.
the issue a moot point. Clearly, some readers
were upset that Print would address the topic
of sex itself; more than one referred to the
Sex Issue, inadvertently, as the “Porn Issue,”
as though sex and pornography are inter-
changeable ideas.
What was your foremost contribution to Print?
fox: I would claim as a “foremost contribu-
tion” bringing Steve Heller into the Print fold.
His contribution to Print over the years as
consultant, adviser, and noodge has been
incalculable. I couldna done it without him.
stevens: One illustrator told me that her
father said he never really understood what
she did until he read the piece I wrote
about her. That became a kind of goal for me.
deneve: I was at Print during a time of ex-
pansion. I was hired as a gal Friday, but
within a few months I was in the editorial
department, writing features. If needed,
I could also jump into the art department and
do pasteups. If nothing else, I was useful!
lasky: A style sheet I constructed in 1989 or
1990. At one point, I also rewrote all the proce-
dures for submitting to and judging the
Regional Design Annual. Both have gone the
way of the allosaurus.
kaye: My personal goal was, and still is, to try
to create breakthrough collaborations be-
tween editorial and design—to knock down
the barriers between those sides and cre-
ate new experiences with content. When they
work well, you don’t see articles or layouts—
you see experiences that convey messages in
new and surprising ways.
brower: Stirring the pot.
for more memories from these and other
print staffers, go to printmag.com.
dialogue / Steven Heller in conversation
stefan sagmeister
design er on sa bbat ic a l
Sagmeister Inc.’s Experimental
Outcamp is located in Bali, Indonesia,
far from Stefan Sagmeister’s head­
quarters on “wonderful West 14th
Street” in New York City. For the sec­
ond time, Sagmeister is scratching the
proverbial “seven-year itch” by drop­
ping out for an entire year, leaving
clients behind, to refresh and renew
himself as a designer and artist.
Sagmeister began his first client-free
year in 2001, when he was 38, and he is
now beginning his second at 46. He
says he has only two more sabbaticals
to go before his retirement age of 65
and argues that it is much more useful
to take those years early, interspersed
through­out his working life, rather
than pin them to the end of it. In fact,
after it became clear that the ideas he
developed during his first sabbatical
subsequently inspired his most success­
ful design projects, he became con­
vinced that he needed to make a respite
integral to his creative regimen. How
many of us dream of doing the same?
Sagmeister has certainly become a
model for those who can consider such
a radical leap; for the rest of us, we’ll
live vicariously. It was in this spirit that
I caught up with him via e-mail to find
out how, a few months into this adven­
ture, his expectations are meeting
reality; what inspired him to select Bali;
and what he misses, if anything, now
that he’s so far away.
Heller: This is your second in a seven-year
cycle of “sabbaticals”; what gave you the
idea to make this a regular part of your
life? sagmeister: My desire for the initial
experimental year had many reasons,
among them my experience that I often
did the best thinking in time periods
without pressure. After my studies, I had
moved from city to city every two years,
so this kind of thinking was often done in
between jobs and places. After running
the studio in New York City for seven years,
I had no intent to move again, so this year
allowed for time to explore. Ferran Adrià,
who is now considered by many to be the
best chef in the world, closes his restaurant
north of Barcelona for six months every
year—while keeping a full kitchen staff—
in order to experiment. That’s half of
As part
of a series
of type
treatments,
Sagmeister
created
the letter s
floating on
water, using
flowers that
fell from
the tree in
front of his
studio.
his time put aside for experimentation,
compared with my paltry 12.5 percent.
If this second year turns out to be as enjoy­
able and influential for the subsequent
work as the first one, I might increase
the percentage consid­erably. Heller: Did
anything else spe­cifically trigger this?
sagmeister: When the 60-year-old Ed
Fella visited our studio in New York and
brought a number of his fantastic four-
color ballpoint typo­graphic experi­ments,
I was completely blown away. He self-
mockingly called it “exit art”—art he does
before he dies. I was in love with the sheer
inventiveness and quality of the work and
at the same time felt that it would have
had a bigger impact on a working life if
interspersed regularly throughout one’s
life. heller: How easy is it to put your
dialogue
client-driven work on hiatus for an entire
year? sagmeister: I had all sorts of fears
before the first year—that we will lose all
our clients, that we will be forgotten, that
we’ll have to start from scratch. As none
of these fears became true the first time
around, I started this second one with few
worries. For me, it was simply a matter
of proper time planning. I just put it into
the plan agenda, worked out the finances,
and told the clients. heller: What appealed
to you about Bali for your year away?
sagmeister: I had spent the first sabbatical
in New York City because the idea of doing
this was as big a bite as I could take at
the time. As I wanted the second year to
be different, my initial thought was not
New York. I know the U.S. and Europe too
well to generate much excitement—I
couldn’t see myself in Arizona for a year—
and don’t know South America and Africa
well enough. So Asia it was. I had worked
in Hong Kong for two years and know
it a bit—and the two most beautiful land­
scapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka
and Bali. As Sri Lanka still has a low-level
civil war going on, my decision fell on
Bali. Aside from the possibility of living in
the jungle and at the same time being five
minutes away from a small town that
would not only have good restaurants but
also sell printer cartridges, it was the in­
cred­ible craft culture that attracted me.
There are entire villages of woodcarvers,
stonemasons, wig makers, textile weavers,
and silversmiths close by. heller: Is there
anything you regret about leaving for a
year? sagmeister: The Obama campaign
asked me to design a poster, and I was
really sorry to not be able to oblige. It was
just before my sabbatical started, and I
had sworn to myself that I would not take
anything on, no matter how tempting.
And anyway, I am very aware that the tiny
influence my little poster might have had
would be only on the converted. heller: I
can’t help but presume part of your retreat
is a critique of contemporary practice. Do
you believe that the contemporary design
language is vital or stagnant? sagmeister:
There is lots of good design work being
done today. I think of Ji Lee, or Rick
Valicenti, or Marian Bantjes, or Maira
Kalman, and many more. It is true,
though, that most people I really admire
have experimentation institutionalized
into their practice. heller: In your own
work you play with various forms—there
is never a single stylistic underpinning.
Do you foresee a new aesthetic emerging
from your travels? sagmeister: Today I
badly copied a page from an 18th-century
Turkish Koran I had seen in the Museum
of International Muslim Art in Kuala
Lumpur. I truly hope this has an influence
on my aesthetics, as typography rarely
reached a pinnacle of such absolute and
total gorgeousness as it did in 15th- to
18th-century Islamic culture, which didn’t
allow pictorial imagery. All the creative
desires had to go into type and ornamen­
tation. heller: You are connected, albeit
intermittently, to the rest of the world.
How do you determine who and what to let
through the doors during this year? Are
there any demanding clients who must talk
to you now? sagmeister: No. All clients
were warned as much as two years in ad­
vance, and most were envious. So far, they
are all very respectful. And of course it
The view
from Sag-
meister’s
Bali studio.
He observes,
“If I can’t
make it
here, I can’t
make it
anywhere.”
helps a lot that Joe Shouldice is in the
studio in New York City, keeping a low
profile while finishing up some jobs
and being there to answer questions.
Richard The and Joe just installed a new
maxim in Amsterdam, “Obsessions Make
My Life Worse and My Work Better.” It
consisted of 250,000 Eurocents carefully
and pain­stainkingly laid out with the
help of many, many volunteers in a public
space in Amsterdam. [Editor’s note: The
coins were removed by Dutch police, who
worried about theft.] Other than that,
we shifted all possible new sentence instal­
lations to September 2009. heller: But
what have you actually learned so far?
sagmeister: When attacked by hollow-
eyed Balinese dogs, I can make them
scatter by pretending to pick up a stone.
heller: So, are you happy? sagmeister:
As I am very aware how boring it is to hear
about other people being happy, I say
only this: I get up every morning at 5 a.m.
simply because it’s more exciting to start
working than to turn around and sleep
some more. I do seem to have a lot of energy.
After enjoy­i­ng a giant pot of coffee and a
medium-sized cigar for breakfast, I start
my daily schedule of little experiments.
This is coming along very well.
 dialogue Steven Heller in Conversation

Mirko Ilić
Designer and illustrator
For more design commentary
from Steven Heller, go to
printmag.com/dailyheller
Mirko Ilić arrived in New York in 1986 and has been some-
thing of a force of nature ever since. He was the first
designer I ever knew who “fired” a client. In addition to
being an illustrator, Ilić, a native of Bosnia, has been art
director of Time’s international edition and The New York
Times Op-Ed page. He now runs a multifaceted design
office, Mirko Ilić Corp., and believes that doing pro bono
work is not optional. Ilić has seen how designers make a
difference to people, organizations, and institutions by
providing clear and informative communications. He is
always ready, willing, and able to give everything, from
advice to design concepts. I caught up with him to
discuss what it means for a designer to do pro bono work
and what is expected by the organizations he helps.

What motivates you to do so much pro bono

steven heller
Print contributing editor, author, and
co-chair of the Designer as Author
program at the School of Visual Arts
mirko ilić
Designer, illustrator, founder of
Mirko Ilić Corp.
work? I was born in what was then Yugo-
slavia, a Communist country at the time.
The nation went through bloody civil wars
based on religious and ethnic intolerance.
I tried to help stop the bloodshed. And that
was not just because this was occurring
in the region where I grew up. Regardless of
where bad things are happening, how can
somebody—an artist—who is supposed to be
sensitive, tolerant, and compassionate
do work exclusively for money and glory?
What determines to what or whom you will
devote your time? Sometimes I do things on
my own, or with some of my friends, like
Daniel Young, when we self-finance projects
for different causes. We then offer our final
product to organizations. Otherwise, they
usually come to me after seeing my work for
someone else, recognizing the possibility of
advancing their causes using my work. I very
rarely refuse to help. A lot of the assistance
goes beyond graphic design to things like
finding a cheap printer. I also get involved in
getting different people together for pro-
jects, giving advice and strategies, and even
suggesting ways to get funding.
A splashy design may get
into design annuals but would
waste an organization’s
money. —Mirko Ilić
What do you expect in return from the
“client”? Respect for my work and my time.
I’ve found that organizations getting some-
thing for nothing are not always willing
to give the designer total freedom. Is this true
for you? If they come to me to ask me for
my design or to create something, obviously
it’s because they couldn’t do it on their own.
And because of that, I don’t think they were
supposed to be involved in the details of
the design. Meanwhile, as a designer, I also
need to know what my obligations are
toward these kinds of projects. In order to
design for an organization like the Auschwitz
Jewish Center, the designer needs to resist
the tendency for self-indulgence and think
about the cause. A splashy and fancy design
may get one’s work into design annuals
but would waste a lot of the organization’s
money. That is not a place for the designer to

top to bottom: Identity for the Auschwitz
Jewish Center, aerial voting campaign
in Florida, and the “Tolerance Is Holy”
poster supporting gay rights in Jerusalem.
show off or self-promote. Also, it would be
counterproductive—would one want a design
for an entity like the Auschwitz Jewish Cen-
ter to be fancy and splashy?
Give me an example of another project where
you took this approach.
Prior to the presidential election in 2004, I
visited South Beach, Florida, and saw
airplanes flying over beaches with party an-
nouncements or birthday messages trailing
behind them in the sky. When the election
approached, remembering what happened in
Florida in the previous election, I felt it was
critical to get people to vote, and I wanted to
do something about it. The airplane came to
mind. I assumed it was not that expensive if
people could use it to announce birthdays.
I found the company who does the announce-
ments for a relatively cheap hourly rate. I
wanted to do a slogan/signage campaign
that did not preach one particular side or an-
other but a neutral one to ask people to
get out and vote. I came up with “FIX THE
MISTAKE!—VOTE!” In that kind of situation,
it’s not a question of using a trendy type-
face or where to sign one’s name but a ques-
tion of getting the message through. I asked
for financial support from Daniel Young,
Louise Fili, and Stefan Sagmeister. With their
help, we managed to have the airplane fly
from the tip of Florida to Fort Lauderdale and
back, from dawn to dusk, for ten days.
You’ve done a lot of work for the Auschwitz
Jewish Center. Do you believe your efforts
have produced results? In the process of
working for them, I did all their logos and
redid their identity. I believe that my effort
produced results, because at each stage they
came back to me for more work. The work
goes beyond design: For the organization’s
Raphael Lemkin Center—Lemkin was the
first to coin the term “genocide”—I helped
to get people from the governments of ex-
Yugoslavian countries to participate in sem-
inars teaching government officials to
recognize the first signs of genocide in order
to prevent it in the future.
How would you define the most successful
of your projects? I worked on a logo design,
this time with Milton Glaser, for the Sajmište
memorial center in Serbia. This was an effort
to reclaim the grounds of a German concen-
tration camp where between 60,000 and
65,000 people were slaughtered. Currently,
one part of this area is a discotheque, and
boxing matches and weddings are also held
there; people are living in another part. I
asked Milton Glaser to help with the logo and
brought with me the renowned architect
and interior designer Adam Tihany, who also
volunteered his services to create the memo-
rial center. I tried to involve as many famous
people as possible in order to give the project
some serious weight. Furthermore, organiz-
ing a roundtable with the likes of architects
Daniel Libeskind and Adam Tihany raised
awareness and brought media coverage to
the effort. Local activist Veran Matic, CEO of
the B92 television station, created a two-part
documentary, which aired on B92 in Serbia
and beyond. I hope all that started the process
of reclaiming the grounds and building the
memorial in the future. For the public, the
only visible work from my end is the logo. But
if they build the memorial, I would consider
it most successful.
Tell me about the “Tolerance Is Holy” project.
Like some other images, you did this on your
own and then found someone to adopt it.
I did the “Tolerance Is Holy” poster with
Daniel Young. What triggered us was an AP
photo of religious leaders in Jerusalem gath-
ering together in one place for the first time
in order to condemn an international gay
conference. After years of bloodshed
and slaughter in the region, nothing could
get them together, but stopping gays did it.
Danny decided we need to do a poster. I
came up with the slogan “Tolerance Is Holy.”
We bought a photo from one of the major
stock houses, an image of Jerusalem with a
rainbow. Interestingly, in their contract
one of the clauses was not to use their stock
photo for any controversial issues, including
homosexuality. We signed it, figuring that
if they ever went after us it would be a huge
embarrassment to them. We printed 2,000
posters and sent them to various organiza-
tions and institutions. The following year, the
gay community officially adopted our slogan
for the Jerusalem gay pride parade.
I was quite touched by your Darfur poster,
which equates the situation with the Nazi
Holocaust. Did you receive any flak for this?
Thinking about Darfur, the image of the fa-
mous poster of a child asking his father,
“Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?”
came to my mind. [The poster, created in 1915
by U.K. designer Savile Lumley, shows
a well-dressed father staring pensively into
the distance.] I was partly asking myself
what I would do if my child asked me what
I did about this enormous suffering and
slaughtering of the people of Darfur. Daniel
Young came up with the idea to use “DAR-
FUR” as an acronym to list the names of Nazi
concentration camps. I developed the design;
we distributed the poster to many organiza-
tions and even paid for it to be posted around
New York City.
 DIALOGUE steven heller in conversation

liz danzico
interaction innovator

For a person with a blazing brain, whose online calendar looks like a mighty brick wall, and
whose vision is directed several years into the future, Liz Danzico manages to stay intensely calm.
The job titles that describe each temporal brick aren’t on many career counselors’ lists—not
yet, anyway. Some of those words and phrases are user experience consultant, usability analyst,
information organizer, and wrangler of 200-word essays (for A Brief Message, the design-themed
website she launched with Khoi Vinh in 2007). This fall, the Interaction Design MFA program
she co-founded (with yours truly) at the School of Visual Arts will debut, packed with students keen
to conquer not just the web but every interactive medium. How did she get here? Danzico, who
is passionate about words, images, ideas, and behavior, has been making all of them quietly and
gloriously compatible for years. She’s been a user experience consultant at Happy Cog, an expe-
rience strategy director for AIGA, a design teacher, the editor-in-chief of the pioneering site Boxes
and Arrows, and leader of the information architecture teams for the Barnes & Noble website
and Razorfish New York. She is also a prolific user of Twitter. I took advantage of a free moment
and asked Danzico about her vision of the program—and the world of interaction itself.

STE VEN HELLER

Print contributing editor, author, co-chair of the Designer
as Author program at the School of Visual Arts

LIZ DANZICO
Co-founder and chair of the MFA in Interaction Design
Program at the School of Visual Arts; editor of A
Brief Message; user experience consultant for Happy Cog

Let’s start with your definition of interaction

[l e f t] A recent entry on A Brief Message.
[r i g h t] Site for MFA in Interaction Design.
design. ⁄ Interaction design shapes the
behavior between people and the interactive
products and services they use. That behavior
can be observed in something ordinary, such as
the way people change the volume on their iPods,
to something complex, such as the way people
choose one rental car service over an-other. It
can also be seen in something private, such as
the way people use keyboard shortcuts with their
favorite applications. Interaction de-sign is
thought of as a relatively new field; it’s only been
within the last two decades that it has taken
on an identity as a professional discipline. But
people have been designing interactions since
well before the last century. The field, there-
fore, still overlaps with other fields and gets
associated with many other areas. It does, in fact,
have its roots in industrial design, cognitive
psychology, and interface design. People natu-
rally associate interaction design with web
design, mobile design, and software or applica-
tion design—fields reliant on technology.
Interaction design doesn’t have to be reliant on
technology, although technology very often
plays a role. ⁄ In the spirit of full disclosure, I
must acknowledge that I asked you to develop
the new MFA in Interaction Design at the School
of Visual Arts. My rationale for the program
is to raise the standard of design in this field.
What’s your rationale? ⁄ Interaction design
is crucial to solving the critical issues faced by
society today. We have a unique opportunity
to craft a program to prepare students to antici-
pate trends, not just react to them, so they can
learn how to humanize the resources available
to them. Students should come away from
the program prepared to creatively solve not just
problems of today, but of tomorrow. This
program is a proactive one, its courses designed
to prepare students for challenges they’ll face
as professionals. ⁄ What are the fundamentals
of this field that are unique and important to
teach? Interaction design is closely related to a
number of different disciplines, and the inter-
action designer’s role is to be a facilitator among
them. Students must become experts in how
humans relate to one another as well as to the
products and services they use. They must
also understand the role of aesthetics and the
changing nature of technology and busi-
ness. Equally important, students must be well
versed in design, since interaction design is
about problem-solving and creating emotional
resonance. Likewise, an understanding of us-
ability is crucial, particularly now, as increased
access to technology creates the potential for ex-
traordinarily complex products and services.
Expressing ideas—whether verbally, digitally,
or physically—is fundamental for a dialogue to
emerge between a person and an object. ⁄ How
do you plan on raising this particular bar? An
interaction designer must be equal parts design-
er, anthropologist, technologist, writer, and
business strategist. We intend to educate stu-
dents so they can in turn inform the business and
design worlds about the role and importance of
interaction design. This program is meant to cre-
ate bridges to the business and design worlds, to
give students a platform to begin this dialogue
immediately. ⁄ How do you integrate good
design and good information presentation? As
with any project, it would depend on the needs of
the audience, the intent of the business, the tech-
nological capabilities—if applicable—and the
role of design to communicate to that audience.
Once one has an understanding of this triad of
users, business, and technology, one
can begin to understand how to structure infor-
mation appropriately. ⁄ Collaboration is even
more critical in this new field than ever before.
So, can there be the lone genius—the solitary
individual that serves as a form-giver? ⁄ Abso-
lutely. Apple, for instance, whose products have
been praised for interaction design and business
innovation, is directed by one individual who
shapes the vision and form. This is an exception,
but it’s a model that works. Each new product,
however dramatic its form or solitary its genius,
now affords the market a new set of challenges.
An object is no longer just an object. It must be
relevant, dynamic, and responsive—with ac-
countability—to its audience in a way we’ve not
seen before. While the lone genius may still
have a place, collaboration is a crucial part of
product development, as interaction designers
must join forces with multidisciplinary teams—
including industrial designers, technologists,
and strategists—to create the final product.
Further, after a product is released, interaction
designers need to consider the feedback of
audiences—meaning designers may have to
collaborate with consumers as well. ⁄
Wireframes for W.W. Norton’s site, for which
Danzico was the information architect.
Presumably, in addition to “training” a new
generation of interaction designers, you want to
venture into the future. What does the future
have in store for this field? The next few decades
promise to offer landmark opportunities for
interaction designers in a few key areas. The first
is gestural interfaces. Consider just a couple
of recent examples, the Wii and the iPhone.
Never before have interfaces—what are called
touchscreen and gestural interfaces—afforded
such opportunities for interaction designers
to change the behavior of people in their every-
day lives. For the first time, people are touch-
ing devices directly to manipulate information.
There’s a level of intimacy that’s new. And with
the growing complexity of technology, our rela-
tionship to these objects has the potential to
get even more complex. Interaction designers
must find ways to humanize and simplify
these relationships to make these experiences
easy and enjoyable. Then there are “distributed”
experiences: Every day, we watch user experi-
ences becoming more fragmented. Consumers
are creating their own products and services; val-
ue is being placed on users creating experiences
themselves. Meanwhile, the rise of distributed
content and delivery platforms is affording data
a place of significance in consumers’ lives as nev-
er before. Data itself may become a recognizable
product, and interaction designers will have to
learn to contribute distributed value to a product
or service that they don’t control, instead of hav-
ing control over the entire user experience. Next,
seams: We’re going to see a rise in “beautiful
seams,” a term coined by Mark Weiser when he
was chief technologist of Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. Consumers will increasingly be
able to con-figure their own systems and organize

students must
become experts in
how humans relate
to one another
as well as to the
products and
services they use.
their own user experiences; the seams should
reveal where these connections take place. The
role of the interaction designer might be to de-
sign the experience at these seams, perhaps, and
to understand how crafting the seams brings
together the entirety of the experience. Adam
Greenfield, Steve Portigal, Dan Saffer, and
others are doing research to show us where in-
teraction designers might focus next. And
finally, advocacy: In some ways, the near-term
future for interaction designers will continue
to be about strengthening the foundation for
the field, establishing the field as an area of
practice, and furthering its visibility as a com-
munity. This advocacy will be an ongoing effort.
⁄ Some of my print colleagues argue that aes-
thetics are left out of the picture in favor of
information architecture and making the most
functional wireframes. Would you argue this
point? Information architecture and the activity
of creating wireframes should be a distinct step
in the design process, not one taken in lieu of
aesthetics. Information archi-tecture should con-
tribute to enhancing the user experience between
people and the products and services they use by
making the access to information useful, us-
able, and desirable. Typically, the role of
wireframes should be to in-form how a designer
might approach shaping the visual design of a
product—they should not impede that process.
If they do, the wireframes are not doing their job.
⁄ Would you agree that the level of design
practice on the web is inferior to that of print?
And if so, is it a fair comparison? If you com-
pared print to web design as if they had the same
intent, then indeed, the web might be consid-
ered an inferior medium in some respects. But
the intent and audience for online design isn’t
comparable to that of print. When discussing
the requirements for a website, designers
might consider questions about an audience’s
mode of use that are far different from the ones
that affect print designers. Should users be
able to subscribe to the content? Should they be
able to view it on their mobile devices? How long
will we offer them access to content from the
past? The answers to these questions will inform
the presentation of the design online so that it
can be presented in a way that meets the require-
ments, and behave in a way that meets the needs
as well. Print is intended to be read or viewed,
and a discussion about that text will happen at a
later time. A website, on the other hand, should
engender a conversation immediately. Its role,
then, is closer to that of a discussion in real time
rath-er than the role that written text plays.
Affordances, therefore, must be put in place
to allow these conversations to emerge, whether
they enable the smooth distribution of content,
the easy contribution of comments, or enable
users to simply copy and paste content onto their
blogs. ⁄ What about success? We have metrics
for determining what works in print—what
about on the web? Metrics of success for print
versus the web remain different. We’re still at the
early stages of determining how to measure
success online, and our tools for doing so might
still be inferior. That said, analytics tools that
measure how visitors use design online are be-
coming more sophisticated, and they’ll have
much more to teach us in years to come about
how to improve or adjust our design practices
so that we can match our processes to modes of
use. ⁄ I remember the bad old days—although
some may see it otherwise—when we were tran-
sitioning from hot type to cold in print design,
and the kinks were not yet ironed out. Do you
see this as a similar period in screen-based de-
sign? Consumers, according to Kevin Kelly in a
New York Times piece in late 2008 (“Becoming
Screen Literate,” November 21, 2008), are be-
coming more comfortable with a ubiquity of
screens. Screens are everywhere—gas pumps,
ATMs, iPhones, seats of planes. Designers’
audiences are growing and becoming more
PRICING
sophisticated as screen literacy is spreading.
39
NEW
And we know the experience is imperfect. Purchase RM
Microstock Images for
$
The larger population has moved from being a smaller projects and limited
usage. Buy online 24/7 at CSAIMAGES.COM
AND UP
Hi-res
“people of the book” to being a “people of the
screen.” There is no better time than now to
iron out the kinks. A MODERN DESIGN RESOURCE AND DIGITAL MUSEUM OF ART FOR COMMERCE