Career Day

The recounting of a scarring experience of an interaction designer who tried to explain his work to his son

Hello. I am an interaction designer and I work for a leading phone manufacturer. That phone in your pocket is probably made by our company. I design applications for the phones and am paid a pretty enviable sum for it. I’ve attended numerous conferences and several parties where I have taken particular pleasure in explaining my specific area of work. You see, I also dabble a little bit in research. I get to throw around big, mutated, self-manufactured, heavily hyphenated, and over complicated words that knock people off their feet. As I frequently like to put it, my work is not just cutting edge technology; it is the friggin bleeding edge of technology: my research is about experiential design in the cognitive space of human machine interaction leveraging the physical aspects of tangibility, the convergence of devices and the conceptual freedom of digital content to empower the end-user for organizing his daily activities. My latest prototype was a gyro sensor and a micro web-cam embedded in a remote-controlled ambulatory carrier that hundreds of alpha-users used to shoot funny videos of their cats being chased by a toy car with a camera. You can find the vids on YouTube. They’re featured videos now, you know. I can show them to you on my phone right now – I have a smart phone.

Well enough of that. I don’t talk like that since the incident that happened the other day. My son came to me and said to me, “Daddy, next week we have career day at school. Will you come and tell us what you do?”

“Sure, son!” I was happy to hear that, of course – one more place where I get to do what I love most: talk about what I do. 
“I’ll be there. I’ll tell all about what I do. Does your classroom have an overhead projector? I will probably have a slide-deck of about 25 slides. I think I can use my laptop to project...”

“Mo-o-om! Daddy’s using the j-words again!”

“Don’t use jargons in front of the kid, dear. You know about his monster gadgets.” My wife thinks our son has nightmares of a robot clubbing him to death with an iPad. She’s just pampering him too much.

“Sorry, son. So, when do I have to come?”

“I don’t know yet, Dad. Other kids’ dads are coming too, though. Anil’s dad works for the army. He kills people, you know! Oh, and Babu’s dad works for the newspaper. He writes those sports columns at the back of our newspaper. And oh, dad.. you remember that nice Chinese restaurant we went to? Where I had the slippery noodles? Chintan’s dad owns that place. They’re all coming. Then there’s Dinesh’s dad who is a doctor. Dinesh was saying, once his dad took out a dead man’s heart with his bare hands and put it inside a woman and brought her to life! I told them I will bring you too because you make phones. My teacher was really happy.”

“Oh, heh. Ahem. Well, good boy, good boy. But we should remember now – daddy does not really make phones.”

“You don’t? Then why do people ask you to get them those phones for cheaper prices?”

“What? Oh.. well, those are employee discou.. well, never mind that. I don’t make the phones.”

“What do you do then?”

“I.. umm, I am an interaction designer, son. I design for Human-computer interaction.”

“Mo-ooo-mm!!”

“Honey?!” My wife has mastered the skill to pronounce some words in a way that completely strips them of their real meaning and dresses them up in the exact opposite. The way she called me ‘honey’ had all the soft sweetness of a lump of earwax slathered on a brick.

“Fine, fine. I.. uh, well, you see all these buttons on the phone’s screen? When you press them, something happens right?”

“Yeah! When I press the red bird, I get to play angry birds. D’you make angry birds, daddy? Do you?”

“Well.. No. But, someone like me probably thought of it. I design the applications, son.”

“Apple cashews?”

“Applications. You see, in a phone, everything that you can do with it is an application. You clicked pictures of Mom on her birthday, right? It means you used the camera application. Everything that the phone has, is an application. The phone is made up of just applications, son. Your angry birds are an application too.”

“I thought it was a game.”

“Yes, games are a kind of application.”

“So when you put applications together, you get a phone?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“So, the cover of this phone – is that also an application daddy? Ooh, then speaking of manners, my shoes are my application, right daddy?!”

“No, no son. That’s hardware.”

“No dad.. my shoes are easy to wear. See? No laces!”

“Hardware, son. hardw…  Never mind. See, son, you can touch and hold the phone right? That’s plastic. That is made in a factory. It’s like TV – the TV is made in the factory, but the cartoons you watch on it are made by people right?”

“Yeah..”

“So, in the same way, I don’t make make the phones. I design the stuff that the phone shows.”

“Ooh, I get it now. So you make stuff like angry birds. And that drawing book thing in which I drew our house on the iPad. Have you made something like that, daddy?”

“Well, no son.. It’s not quite like that. You see, I don’t really make make the applications. I design them.”

“Huh? You don’t make the phone, you don’t make the application, then what do you make daddy?”

“I, well, I.. I make presentations, son, which explain my design. Presentations are like a story. Only, the story is about the application. I show it to the people who make the phone. If they like it, they put it on their phones.”

“So, one person makes the application. That’s not you. Another person makes the phone. That’s not you either. You are the person who tells stories to them both?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Mommy?”

“Yes dear?”

“We have career day next week. Could you come and tell them how you make food for me?”

“Why dear? Why don’t you take daddy?”

“I thought daddy has a job but daddy doesn’t do anything, he just talks. And teacher punishes us when we just talk and don’t do work, so she may not allow daddy on career day.”

I sort of blanked out after that. In my line of work, I am not allowed to take rejection gracefully. So, I immediately fished out my iPad and consumed media until my nerves felt calm again. I’ve not completely recovered yet, but I am on a daily dose of half an hour of app hunting on iTunes and android marketplace, and one hour of twitter, facebook and reading blogs on the iPad. On some bad days, I do a few minutes of reading gadget reviews on tech-sites, just to be safe. Kids these days, I tell you, are just too pampered. What they need is a good dose of the real world.