Millicent Cooley Change, Information and Understanding ConferenceThemesin 1997-98 Recently I met with a group of Colleagues, all with masters' degrees i n interaction and communication design, to discuss the current state of our careers. I heard job titles such as "Innovator" that would have been unimaginable several years ago. Many of us perform similar work yet few of our titles quite describe what we actually do. O u r activities as designers are evolving so quickly that industry terminology can't keep up. Designers, in general, play an increasingly important role in an economy of accelerated change, where new solutions and specialties continually emerge. Tremendous amounts of money and serious social and political consequences are at stake. Digital media, technology, and particularly the web offer new forms for human interchange which challenge social norms, and for which there is not yet a mature and distinctive language of expression. It's an exciting time for designers. This year I attended two conferences that addressed these new challenges to designers. One was The Living Surfaces conference held in Chicago last November, sponsored by the American Center for Design. The other was the Vision Plus 4 conference held in Pittsburgh this recent March,
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