DesignAday

My name is Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.

DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
Feb 27
Permalink

Techsuck

Time has been weighing on my thoughts lately. I never seem to have enough of it. I’m involved in so many activities, all of them rewarding, but I’m stretched awfully thin.

Technology impacts my time quite a bit. Certainly, there are ways that technology saves a lot of time for me, but this is balanced by all of the time I spend doing things that I wouldn’t be doing if it weren’t for technology.

Thanks to my Nikon digital SLR and iPhoto, I spend a lot of time naming, cropping, color-correcting, keywording, organizing, and blogging photos. I’m currently working on photos from this past Summer. Yep, I’m half a year behind. There was a time when I simply dropped a roll of film in an envelope and then spent a few minutes sliding prints into the plastic sleeves of an album.

Thanks to my Cannon digital video camera and iMovie, I spend time importing and editing video. I’m behind on this too. I’m still working on video from 2006.

Then there’s the time that I spend troubleshooting problems, updating software, charging batteries, and performing various other maintenance activities. 

Thanks to the internet, my Mac, and Tumblr, I’m sitting here at 12:41 in the morning, writing a blog post. Well, at least this is one thing I’m not behind on.

Overall, I do believe the benefits are worth the time spent. The good news is that Interaction Design can improve technology so that it is less time consuming. The warning is that Interaction Design can make out-of-reach activities accessible, sucking us into spending more of our time, or at least redirecting it from other pursuits.