I was at a wedding at the weekend, and the question I really hate getting is “what do you do”. I really wish there was some term that could be used to describe the job which I guess I do. I’ve had a few job titles, most of them rather vague or woolly (senior creative technologist, game designer, technical creative, interaction designer). We need a new job title that covers a lot of this stuff in a way that people get, as opposed to the reaction “oh you make games” or the one that is like a stake through my heart “oh you’re in IT”. This will also prevent me from spending ten minutes rambling “well I do a bit of design… no not really graphic design, more the way it behaves…. and yeah I do some programming…. and yeah i make animals in 3D sometimes”.

One thing that I’ve noticed over the past few years is that some subjects and areas of work that I used to be really passionate about have lost their allure. I hope that it is not extreme cynicism that has made me more focussed on some interests and less keen on other areas of the digital landscape, but I personally feel that one thing is to blame - specialism.

Following on from the previous discussion of the RCA Show, it does seem that more areas that previously overlapped are becoming more specialised, that perhaps as these areas of study are becoming more elaborate, practitioners feel that they should become more specialised themselves. Perhaps there is the assumption that the only unexplored territory, the only frontiers left to push back are deep rather than broad.

I’m a generalist. I love being a generalist. This is mainly because there are many things that interest me and I don’t want to be forced to work on a single aspect of a project, or a single genre of project. The trouble is that the more I look around, the more that specialism seems to be a requirement. Freelancing certainly seems to be the best antidote to this (I’m currently working on a big installation for the natural history museum, an educational project for the BBC and starting a t-shirt business - great for my ADD), but I do worry that generalists are not being considered as vital for a project, and that roles are mostly being considered along traditional hierarchical lines (eg creative/design/technical).

If you take the Flash community for example, initially those that were attracted to Flash came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Everyone did a bit of everything - you had coders with an eye for design, and designers that knew enough Actionscript to pull a site together. You look at the situation now, and its a case of never the two shall meet - Actionscript is now maturing into a Java-esque language, flash coders now have to implement design patterns and are writing reams of OO code which goes far beyond the average designers abilities or interests. While its easy to take a nostalgic look back a few years, the truth is that any industry is less interesting to work in when you are unable to work outside your core specialisation. Most designers I know enjoyed the fact that they could get things moving about with a few scrappy lines of code, and most of the coders early days were quite happy to mock up wireframes, create simple timeline animations or to create visual effects that they could recommend to the designers.

The projects that have really resonated with me in the grandest way are those that have made startling connections between entirely different spheres of work. People like Gaudi (combining science, nature, religion and art), artists like Eduardo Paolozzi (art, philosophy, computer science, nature), Mathematicians like Benoit Mandelbrot (mathematics and the aesthetics of structure of nature), Tesla, and of couse Leonardo da Vinci (umm pretty much everything). Lets celebrate the generalist!

The partitioning of knowledge is the antithesis of creativity. Creativity at its highest form is the connection of hugely disparate ideas to form an entirely original subject, idea or object. Everyone is creative and has the power of making such connections that can lead to huge successes in any field. Their confidence to work in areas outside of their comfort zone has to be nurtured and it is the responsibility of management to build this. So if you are in such a position, end excessive specialisation now, please.

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