His interface designs have provided rich media user experiences for best selling videogames by Electronic Arts and LucasArts Entertainment. In a previous life he designed motion graphics for broadcast and corporate clients including Turner Broadcasting, The Golf Channel, Westinghouse and MCI-Worldcom (in retrospect, the Worldcom production budget seemed unusually large.)
Why interactivity?
“Interactive media, for me, has always been about figuring out why people behave as they do. On the one hand you have to take users seriously, but on the other hand users want to be told what to do.... Is user experience the end goal of the design, or does user experience conform to any design we care to make?
On the production side of things, UI design for games is easily the dirtiest job in the industry, full of opportunity though. Its not so difficult to imagine doing things that have never been done in this field, yet getting things done is as much political, conceptual and technical as it is artistic. Rewards my obsessive-compulsive-ritualistic tendencies, you see.”
How did you become a part of the design culture industry™?
“Well, arguably, anyone with a wallet is part of that particular game, but there are civilians and then there are what I guess you could call
hackers, although the distinction is certainly less clear than it used to be. After artschool I worked as a broadcast designer. Some time later I began designing for interactive media. There's been a deep involvement with interactive systems since the TRS-80 era when it became apparent that
the inside was larger than the outside.”
As far as being part of the industry - I've never been the one transmitting the signals. I was just following orders! The scale of these projects, the money involved meant it was always someone elses's message that I was sending. For me, the next generation of gaming won't have arrived until game development is much smaller.
It can't keep on this way. More people and money has hit dimishing returns. My hope remains that mature 3rd party tools will emerge and allow users a far greater role in game development. For console titles in increasingly seems to me that we are in the business of making artifacts rather than the ecosystem you see on the web ”
Where do the ideas come from?
“From a need to understand human behavior. Maybe from the effort of adapting to a new life when my family moved to the United States. The unspoken codes underlying American
consumer culture are profoundly mysterious; enough so that years later I still don't fully understand. Baseball cards for example, or Disney entertainment… what's that all about? Graphic design is a way to decode those messages and feed them back into the culture. The illusion of control.”
What is your working method?
“It changes. There was a time when I worked in isolation for the most part. Currently, productive collaboration is a major concern. Design by committee, even worse, design on the fly leads to all the wrong compromises. So I previsualize everything and create prototypes early on. By working the prototypes and taking a hands-on approach I’ve found you go into production with reasonable expectations. I’m a realistic optimist—sometimes major breakthroughs happen in response to unknowns and I live for the happy
accident! I strive to create a situation where I’ll recognize it when I see it.”
Are you working on any personal projects?
“I'm constructing a body of work for a project called Model Villain Factory, utilizing photography and image manipulation. It’s about glamour and false persona and how the
mask is more real than the face it conceals. I enjoy staging photo shoots and the planning that goes into it. It’s a way of combining the real and the synthetic that I find fascinating. Is the synthetic implicit in the real or is it the other way around?”
“I’m rethinking my expectations of motion graphics, experimenting with synthetic rendered imagery and
typography. I’ve been questioning my intentions quite a bit. Why should the image be in motion at all? What is the added value? There's a
literalism to animation which bothers me. The fact that there's a beginning and end bothers me. Still figuring out what animation means to me other than eye candy.”
Do you show work at galleries?
“I've exhibited work but don’t fully understand public display of artwork. I do my own work
because I have to. When I go to galleries or museums I usually experience a complete lack of involvement like there's a glass wall between me and the work. By comparison, live music is a lot more visceral. The experience of seeing someone in tears at a
concert years ago left me wondering why I'd never seen anything comparable at a gallery opening.”
“Unless I have the opportunity to see the same artwork over a period of time and can form a personal relationship, I'm not really seeing it. Looking at something is easy, seeing it takes time. The gallery space rewards novelty not memory—but if the purpose of displaying work is simply to place a
product, on the market then of course I’m all for that effort.”
