The Student, the Designer
Hey, I'm Josh Thatcher, a student of media and design--always learning, never fully grasping this brave new world we're living in.
I'm a senior at Washington State University, Vancouver campus, picking up my last few credits in the Digital Technology and Culture program, and a Cisco account manager at Prolifiq Software in Beaverton, Oregon. My goal is to be proficient in a variety of multimedia areas so as to be an asset in whatever I do, and to be able to communicate at a high level with those I'm in contact with.
In today's working world, everything is specialized. Everyone is uber-trained to be as quick and efficient at their part of the "assembly line" as possible so the final product comes out neat and clean and able to turn a profit. The less time it's in the factory, the less the workers are being paid and the more likely it is to be able to sell on the market for a profit.
That's just good business practice.
Unfortunately, in today's multimedia-driven world, things move and change very quickly. Instead an assembly line that pumps out just one thing, it's almost as if we're constantly looking to custom-design things, with only a few constants to work with. Whereas there are many professions where you could take a 10-year leave and come back to pretty much the same job, 10 years out of the multimedia design industry and you'd likely be completely lost.
Having barely lived two decades, I've seen this thing called the Internet get huge, and websites grow and change from simple text to a fireworks-like display of complex Flash animation and back to simple text in this Web 2.0 phase we're going through. The tools of the trade are constantly evolving, with new useful programs being developed every day. In this world, a hammer just doesn't stay a hammer--our "hammer" is constantly being re-invented and re-thought day in and day out.
And you're saying this because...
So why does this matter? I think there are some things that are foundational to the industry. A good sense of what looks good and what doesn't look good athstetically is always going to be important. The ability to use intuition and logic to pick up new programs quickly is always going to be useful.
Having a basic foundation in a host of multimedia design fields gives me the ability to jump into the assembly line just about anywhere and quickly pick up and learn my task and perform at a high level. Flexibility. Perhaps that's as valuable as anything in this industry.
