Interview with Gilbert Cockton

Gilbert Cockton was born in 1958 in Low Elswick in the West End of Newcastle, the family moved to the Montagu council estate on the outskirts of Newcastle, when he was fifteen months old. He has an older brother and sister.

 He says: “I’m from a working class family, my mother was a housewife, once we were at school, she worked in a school as an assistant on school lunches and also domestic tasks and cleaning.  My father was a charge hand, a blue collar manager of a small group, at Clarke Chapman’s, the marine engineers in Gateshead.  They made deck gear for ships: e.g., capstans, windlasses, cranes.”

Both of his parents left school at fourteen, so they were both very keen for him and his brother to have an education.

Gilbert attended his local primary school and then Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School from 1969 to 1976, where he benefitted from his teachers, especially for Latin (to A Level) and Greek (to O level). “I was in the top maths set, so I only did the Additional Mathematics O Level. My interests varied, so I had very inconsistent exam results at sixteen; I got top grades in Physics, Geography and Latin, but not in History. Despite that, at A level I did History, Latin with Roman History, and Economic history with Politics. At school, I very much did what I wanted to, and generally that’s been the pattern in my career, that I primarily do things that interest me. I ended up doing so much history at A level, because I really got interested in history.”

Having sat five of his eight A level papers in history, Gilbert sat the entrance exams for Cambridge, and gained a place (with an open exhibition entrance award, from St John’s College) to study history, starting in 1977.  He says: “I did two years of history, and then I decided I wanted to teach, so I did two further years of education.  What also attracted me about the Education Tripos was at the time it was the only Tripos (course) in Cambridge where you could do philosophy, psychology and sociology together, and you carried on with two papers in your teaching subject. This turned out to be a very good preparation for HCI in that I’d actually studied the main disciplines, apart from computing.  There was a paper on computing and research methods, which I didn’t do because I was sat on good results at the end of my third year and there was a strong chance that I would get a first-class degree, which I did get, and I didn’t want to risk that by doing something difficult and risky like a computing course.”

Gilbert’s first encounter with a computer was while renting a house in Derbyshire while teaching history and social studies.  He says: “The landlord had a ZX81 computer. One day I was looking at it and the landlord just threw the manual at me and said, ‘Oh, go on, I can see you want to use it’.  So I started teaching myself how to use a ZX81.”

A computer designer on the Plessey micro in Nottingham moved into the house and Gilbert received computer lessons in the pub from him. Gilbert adds: “We had Commodore PETs in the school, with a RM380Z in a science lab that I could not use. I started writing programs for teaching history and social studies. I wrote an essay planning program and one for calculating pie-chart angles. I was an interaction designer before I was doing HCI. I also developed a program which had animated graphics and natural language input for teaching the history of medicine, but I ran out of memory: the PET only had 32K. I wrote my own screen editor for the PET as a BASIC subroutine to enter block graphics directly as BASIC code.”

Having become very interested in computer-assisted learning, Gilbert originally applied for PhD at Surrey in the education research group led by Lewis Elton (the comedian, Ben Elton’s father), who was one of the pioneers of computer-assisted learning. With PhD funding uncertain due to the end of the Social Sciences Research Council, as a back up plan, Gilbert applied for Masters courses in computing. He says: “That was the year when universities like Heriot-Watt had responded to the Alvey Programme by getting funding from the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) to offer MSc courses on advanced computing.”

With a SERC PhD award, (conditional on passing the MSc exams), Gilbert was able to undertake his PhD at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He explains how this led him into HCI, he says: “I got into HCI by looking at developing software systems to support user interface programming.  The idea was just as a database management system looks after the management of data for a program, a user interface management system would look after the management of the user interface. I implemented some experimental software, but my eventual thesis was more theoretical (Architecture and Abstraction in User Interface Management) on specification notations and design architectures for interactive software.  There were many of us at the time in computer science in HCI who thought it was important if you’re doing HCI in a computer science department, it has to look like computing.  It was good having Stuart Anderson as my second supervisor at Heriot-Watt because I was applying formal methods to specifying user interfaces for the dialogue.  For the other parts of the user interface, the conceptual model, I developed an object-oriented notation, and for input, much lower-level ones.  But we were clearly working within the research methods and practices of computer science.”

At Heriot-Watt Gilbert was a member of the Man Machine Interaction (MMI) Group, led by Mike Norman who became co-director of the Scottish HCI Centre (SHCIC) with Jim Alty of Strathclyde University.  Brian Sharratt was the first postdoc in the Heriot-Watt MMI group.

Following his PhD studentship, Gilbert continued to work at the SHCIC, providing HCI support for industry alongside his research. Among the centre’s projects was the development of a program with a local SME for integrating company accounts, which was demonstrated to Ken Clarke at the opening of the IT conference in Manchester in 1988.   After Mike Norman moved to Hull, there were difficulties with the running of the SHCIC at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh. In response to this, Brian and Gilbert were offered lectureships to allow them to jointly manage the Edinburgh half of the SHCIC. Gilbert felt that it was too early in his career for such a role (he had not submitted his PhD thesis). It soon felt time to move on, so Gilbert contacted Phil Gray at Glasgow University to ask about postdoc opportunities in their Department of Computing Science.

Luckily, there was a suitable vacant postdoc role on a project with Bell-Northern Research, Nortel’s research arm, led by John Patterson. The project was developing graphical user interfaces for switch maintenance in telephone exchanges.  The HCI postdoc role has not been easy to fill. Gilbert says: “I worked in a small team there with a fine artist, Tunde Cockshott who did all the icons and the graphics and I prototyped the compositing in HyperCard. … I was working with industry again and that project was very successful.” With Glasgow keen to keep Gilbert, they created an HCI lecturer’s post and after successfully being interviewed with one other candidate, he was offered the role. He adds: “That’s when I became a computer science lecturer.”

With Phil Gray, Gilbert developed HCI teaching in Computing Science at Glasgow from five hours of second year teaching to teaching full modules through to the final (fourth) year. Of the first cohort of 16 on the HCI4 course, Gilbert says: “Steven Clarke rose through the ranks to Principal User Experience Researcher  at Microsoft working on Visual Studio (Gilbert supervised Steve’s PhD).  Fraser Hamilton went on to work with Helen Petrie on the world’s largest assessment of website accessibility for the Disability Rights Commission in 2003.  Susan Spence went on to do cloud computing work with Hewlett Packard (with Google from 2018), so she did a more traditional systems engineering PhD.” Others secured graduate posts with top companies such as Logica and Philips.

Gilbert completed his PhD while a lecturer at Glasgow, working full time until 1994 when he reduced his hours to take on childcare responsibilities each week because his wife, a doctor, had gained promotion to a consultant role in North Tyneside. He says: “We moved for Ros’s job. I went part-time at Glasgow until 1996, I would go up there most weeks for two days, staying overnight at a friend’s apartment, finishing off my PhD supervisions, teaching HCI and Design Theory, and continuing my research: my two PhD students at Glasgow, Darryn Lavery and Steven Clarke, who both went to work at Microsoft, got me into user-centred design.”  Darryn was focused on evaluation methods and Steven on contextual design, expanding Gilbert’s main HCI research beyond its sole focus on software aspects of interactive systems development.

In 1995, Gilbert added a second part-time job in industry as a research associate on ESPRIT Framework IV projects (Sunderland University was a partner in one of them). He had offered to fill a role initially on two language technology projects at MARI Computer Systems in Ashington until they could recruit to two full time posts, but was kept on after this as a senior consultant. He adds: “So I was 30% in Glasgow, 50% at MARI, and that filled up my time till ’96.”  His remaining 20+% was taken up with childcare and consultancy. His expectation was that he would leave academia and concentrate on work in industrial R&D.

A call from his father changed this. He told Gilbert about an advert in the local evening newspaper for a role as senior lecturer in computing at Northumbria University, and then popped the advert in the post. Not wanting to return to work full time while he still had childcare responsibilities, Gilbert contacted the Head of Department to see if he would consider a part-time applicant. He withdrew the post and readvertised it as part time. Gilbert applied and was successful, initially working one day a week until he had completed his part time contract at Glasgow. He dropped to one day per week at MARI after increasing to 50% at Northumbria. He then pulled back to only working at Northumbria, which allowed him to also continue working on a part-time basis as a consultant in design work with industry clients such as NCR.  He says: “I did a lot of freelance design work, and also reviewing and evaluation work as an expert for the European Commission during that period.”

After moving to 50% part time as a senior lecturer, Gilbert was advised to apply to be promoted to a Reader and was successful. Building on the PhD work of Darryn and Steven, he also started an HCI and Information Systems group called Context, Analysis, Design and Evaluation of Novel Computing Environments (CADENCE).  The group grew steadily to around ten people in the first year, including Susan Turner, with whom Gilbert had worked with at MARI, and Lynne Hall, who had moved back to the UK from Spain. Darryn Lavery was a postdoc on an EPSRC project led by Gilbert during this period.

Several months after Gilbert started at Northumbria University, Sunderland University advertised for Research Chairs, one of which was in Information Systems. Gilbert was invited to consider applying by John Tait, with whom he had worked on one of the projects at MARI. He applied, was interviewed, and was offered the post, which he accepted.

Gilbert says: “So I got back into academic computing, primarily through my father reading the local newspaper. I wasn’t looking for another academic post, I was quite happy working at MARI, but within months of starting at Northumbria I was invited to apply for a Research Chair.”  There was no way to realistically work part-time as a Research Chair, so with both children at school, Gilbert returned to full-time work.

Soon after he arrived in Sunderland, Sharon McDonald was appointed to a research lectureship. Together they started an HCI research group. Sharon would go on to be Professor of HCI in Sunderland before she moved on to a Senior User Researcher role in the Government Digital Service.  Lynne Hall later joined the staff at Sunderland. Darryn Lavery joined the group as a research associate. Gilbert says of the group: “That was a broad group, pulling together research across HCI and some Information Systems work to get a research culture going in a former polytechnic.” This enterprise became even broader when the group’s work extended beyond research and teaching to the recently foregrounded “third leg” of reach out to industry, government, and communities.

The deputy vice-chancellor wanted Sunderland University’s computing department to be involved with multimedia. After research to identify where the digital media companies were in the north-east, what they were interested in, and what sort of collaboration they would like, Gilbert began a series of meetings with companies. The outcome was that Gilbert was tasked with finding funding for a network of regional digital media companies. He says: “We got the funding for the Digital Media Network (DMN), which I saw as a technology transfer project.”

The DMN project soon morphed into a clustering project when Ed Brown (DTI Industrialist, Government Office North-East), and Tom Cosh (Head of Economic Development, Newcastle City Council), sparked Gilbert’s interested and helped to reframe the project. Gilbert adds: “It was a membership organisation anyway, so, it was appropriate that we did things that were compatible with the funding that were really to their benefit. … We had a series of these projects, we ended up with a big regional centre of excellence funded by the DTI and Europe, called CODEWORKS.  I pulled back from leadership at that point, I didn’t want to be chief exec of an organisation like that, and instead followed on as director of a CODEWORKS support project across four north-eastern universities providing technology and product/business strategy support for digital companies.”  Support from this North East IT Reach Out (NITRO) project included usability (Sunderland) and accessibility (Teesside) work. Chris Bailey was the accessibility research assistant at Teesside for NITRO. He has been president of UK UXPA since 2017 and is currently Digital Channels Accessibility Lead at HSBC.

Gilbert adds: “The key thing for Sunderland university was that I then had a group of probably getting on for twenty who were combining teaching, research and reach out working with industry and other organisations such as art groups, local government, and charities. That was great because we could do really good applied research, not necessarily as part of the project, but we could source examples to test things out. Team members developed a balanced skill set, with my MPhil and later PhD student Alan Woolrych working across research, teaching, and consultancy. Alan went on to work for the Government Digital Service and then Sage until his untimely death in 2017. Alan built on Darryn’s research, co-authoring five of my dozen most cited papers (including the top cited one) and providing the background for a sixth.

It was a great few years. It was very busy because I was having to do breakfast and evening networking events, but that was very important for really giving a boost to the digital sector in the north-east and it soon became the top centre for digital start-ups outside of London.  A lot of start-ups move to Newcastle and the surrounding area, because there’s a much better quality of life than in the Greater South East, and the graduate supply is really good.”

“I also co-chaired the ACM CHI 2003 conference during this period, became UK representative and Vice-Chair of IFIP TC13 on HCI, and was a member of the ACM Software Systems Award Subcommittee (Chairing it for 2002). This all made me even busier.”

The CODEWORKS NITRO project ended in 2005. Team members started their own businesses or worked in universities, some as web developers. Chris and Alan continued work on the HEFCE funded Digital Knowledge Exchange and other research and consultancy roles at Teesside and Sunderland respectively until 2012, when they both left for jobs in industry.

As the CODEWORKS project was coming to an end, Gilbert was nominated for a National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) Fellowship, which he started at the end of 2004.  Gilbert prepared a personal development plan focused on value-centred design. He’d learnt to think in terms of value propositions from DMN board members (in particular, from Peter Bulloch, then MD of Geo-net Solutions in Darlington).

“A focus for NESTA Fellowships was “filling the creative space between science and art.” He continues: “I could pretty much travel wherever I wanted to, talk to whoever I wanted to.  For example, I went to Philips Design, talked to Steven Kyffin and others there and got an idea of how Philips were managing their design processes.” This all made a great change from being very very busy. It was great having so much time to think (the fellowship bought Gilbert out for 40% of his time).

“My mentor for my NESTA Fellowship was Gillian Crampton Smith, who brought her husband, Phil Taylor, former professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, along to help.  So, I got two extraordinary mentors for the price of one. I learnt so much from them. I thought I understood design, but gosh, I just learnt a lot, and then I learnt even more.”

When his NESTA funding ended in 2008, Gilbert focused on management and teaching at Sunderland, alongside publishing and further developing the research results from his NESTA fellowship. He taught games design, with some teaching on research methods.  He was also on the leadership team for two pan European COST networks on usability and user experience: MAUSE and TwinTide. Alan was an active contributor to these networks, along with Mark Hindmarch from the Sunderland NITRO team.

His NESTA Fellowship had moved Gilbert from what he describes as “the design end of computing to the computing end of design”. A year after the fellowship ended, Northumbria University advertised five research-focused professorships in the School of Design. Gilbert successfully applied for one of them, completing his switch of primary focus from Computing to Design. As part of his interview, Gilbert pointed out that on one important bibliometric score (first authored papers at the ACM CHI conference), the combined scores of Northumbria and Sunderland would put them second, above UCL and behind Glasgow, where he had been a founder of their GIST research group.

Gilbert explains: “Ever since a Masters course where I taught a design theory component at Glasgow, I’d naturally adopted creative studio practices, for some reason that just seemed to be the right way to do it. I developed this further when teaching multimedia and games design at Sunderland. We were just doing crits and things like that in  computing departments, because we couldn’t see any other way of teaching design, so I turned up at Northumbria thinking I knew about it.”

Gilbert continued “There were a lot of things that Gillian and Phil said that I had half understood and didn’t really accept or get, but once I was in the centuries old context of studio-based teaching in Northumbria, a lot of the things that Gillian and Phil had been saying just clicked, and I finally really got it.

So I pretty much pulled out of HCI research, apart from in CHI, because the design community there was building up, particularly around Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman and Shelley Evenson at CMU, and Bill Gaver at the Royal College of Art and then at Goldsmiths.  It was good timing because I could make that move into a design research space without abandoning CHI.”

I spent the last seven years of full-time university work as Associate Dean and then Head of Department, soon after which I dropped to three days a week, focusing on research management, supervising dissertations, and co-editing ACM Interactions magazine with Simone Barbosa of PUC-Rio (2016-2020). I retired in early 2019 but by Easter I was back part-time (1-2 days per week) at Sunderland, supporting Sharon McDonald with their UK research assessment returns. I retired again in March 2021. I received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2020.

What came out of Gilbert’s NESTA fellowship was looking at ways of connecting designs to value propositions, which developed into BIG design.  Gilbert said “My line on value propositions is that what really marks out the best design is generosity. To only give the user or the client what they asked for in creative design is seen as an abject failure. The architect of the South Bank, Denys Lasdun, said give your client what they never imagined was possible and never knew that they could want, but when they see it, they know that’s just what they wanted. That’s what the generosity is about, that your goal should always be to design beyond what anyone could imagine was possible, and that to me is the mark of all great design.”

In early 2010 Gilbert developed his Balanced, Integrated and Generous (BIG) paradigm. This name was a play on the idea of ‘high design’ (Stefano Marzano, Philips Design), which he felt lacked breadth.

He explains: “I jokingly came up with BIG as an acronym to basically say you don’t just want design to have height or depth, it’s got to have breadth as well. It’s what Buckminster Fuller called comprehensive thinking.  … Balanced, Integrated, Generous design is a framework for design where you’re, insofar as resources and time allow, constantly balancing and rebalancing the different work streams within a project.  Because those work streams are going on separately, you’re integrating as much as possible explicitly between those, accepting that sometimes you will not be able to, but evaluation can later make some of these connections.  And then finally, as far as product strategy is concerned, you need to generous. You don’t just ground purpose in what you know about beneficiaries, you don’t just give people what they say they need and want, you look for opportunities to make things better, you look for opportunities to do things that they’ve not thought of.  And you don’t just give them what you or they think they need and want, you give them things that they’d never imagined was possible.  In that sense it’s not just generous, really good design delights.”

Gilbert explains his involvement with the British HCI community after joining the Scottish HCI Centre, adding: “We were networking very quickly. I was invited down to STC in Harlow for a meeting of one of the Alvey projects running at Heriot-Watt before Mike Norman left, the Adaptive Intelligence Dialogues (AID) project. I presented and discussed my research on dialogue specification.”

At the meeting, Gilbert met with various people on the AID project, including Dermott Brown from Data Logic, and several from STC. He also visited York University, where the Alvey “Five Man” HCI Project was running. He says: “Stuart Anderson, myself and some of the other researchers went down to discuss formal methods in HCI with Michael Harrison, Harold Thimbleby, Alan Dix, Nick Hammond, and Andrew Monk.”

Before these meetings, Gilbert had had a paper on dialogue specification using transition networks accepted for the first British conference in 1985. He adds: “It was a critique of existing user interface management systems, because they’d not done a good job in terms of formal methods and the mathematical side of the dialogue specification languages they were writing, there some key flaws in them. That was quite a critical paper but that was the background I brought with me from the humanities. In critical disciplines, if something doesn’t make sense and doesn’t add up, you say so. It turns out that STEM disciplines tend to be quite conservative and there’s a lot of loyalty within the discipline, so rocking the boat is not seen as a good thing in a lot of STEM disciplines, but with my humanities background it was already baked into me.  So that was my first paper and that’s when I met many UK HCI people for the first time.”

Asked about the main milestones of the British HCI movement, Gilbert points to the Alvey Programme which he says was very important in providing funding for man-machine interfaces, which was given the better genderless HCI name with the establishment of three Alvey HCI centres: in Scotland, the Midlands; and London.

He also highlights the groups that emerged including several that began the discipline in the UK. He says: “There was HUSAT in Loughborough – Human Sciences and Advanced Technology – who were within the ergonomics community, as was the UCL Ergonomics Unit, led by John Long. At Loughborough, Brian Shackel was the professor in charge, but there were many other people there, including Susan Harker, Leela Damodoran, Ken Eason, Martin Maguire. In the Midlands centre was also Leicester Polytechnic with Ernest Edmonds, who subsequently moved to Loughborough.  Loughborough and Leicester were key centres and Ernest had done work on user interface management systems as well, which was key research for my PhD. London UCL was initially an ergonomics centre and their partner was computer science at Queen Mary College, with Steve Cook and Peter Johnson, a psychologist who became a central figure in British HCI. Steve Cook was a computer scientist, focussed on object-oriented programming.  The universities that had a strong HCI element to them included Strathclyde with Jim Alty, Mike Norman at Heriot-Watt in Scotland, as well as other other Alvey HCI Centre universities (Loughborough, Leicester Polytechnic, UCL, QMW).   There were other strong HCI groups at Huddersfield Polytechnic in Computing, and Essex and Southampton in engineering, Alan Newell was at Southampton, Brian Gaines and Ian Witten were at Essex.”

On the industry side of the Alvey Programme, Gilbert says: “From the outset it had academics, universities and companies working together. It was very clear from the early days where the HCI groups were in industry.  They were in IBM at Hursley Park, ICL (Andrew Hutt led the group there), STC in Harlow, Logica in Cambridge, and Data Logic, who did a lot of software for dealing systems in the City, they did very early work there.  IBM was doing work with the military; in the nineties they did all the user testing for the military air traffic control centre at Boulmer, which had a budget of a million pounds for the user testing, because it wasn’t just the actual user test people, it was the planes in the air and the pilots etc.”

Asked about the peculiarity of the UK HCI community and its impact, Gilbert says: “What’s really distinctive about the UK is interdisciplinary working.  We can do it very well, it’s not perfect, but we just do multidisciplinary work really well.  We don’t have the hierarchies, autocracies and structures that drive wedges between subjects in other countries.”  He added that some academic disciplines continued to have powerful pockets of resistance to applied interdisciplinary research. However, UK HCI has done very well despite this.

He points again to the Alvey Programme and the subsequent large research council funded projects, especially Equator and Horizon, where Tom Rodden provided continuous leadership. Tom is currently Chief Scientific Adviser for the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport and was previously Deputy Chief Executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Few if any areas of UK computing have produced a leader of this stature and standing.

Gilbert also suggests that the community in the UK is prepared to take very challenging intellectual risks, adding: “No one in the States would persist in doing Harold Thimbleby’s research, they’d just see so as far too risky. Harold does it because he believes that we do need mathematically sound approaches to interaction design, and whilst I stopped doing research there, he’s been able to keep going.  I don’t think that would have been possible in the States.  I think we’re just bolder and better able to focus on foundational research rather than always jumping from one current fad to the next.”  He added that not all HCI researchers can do this, but a significant group have done, with many of whom are established leaders in their research area.

Gilbert joined the BCS HCI group after its first conference when the group was looking for a meetings secretary. He says: “It was a very successful conference, it was a very vibrant community and there were quite a few of us from the Scottish HCI Centre who had papers in that conference.  I was in the same session as Alan Dix and Phil Gray. I got to meet people very quickly.  … I established a meetings programme of six meetings a year: five in London at the Charing Cross Hotel, and then one other one elsewhere. They really brought the community together.”

Looking at the potential challenges for technology over the coming decade, Gilbert says: “For IT as a whole, what I would hope to see, is development practices in AI improving considerably.  I think there will be political pressure there, particularly in Europe.  At the moment it’s a Wild West and people can just do what they want.

“I think at the moment much of what people call AI  is not AI, it’s often just a basic algorithm, and often a really bad algorithm.  I would hope that people writing platforms that involve Artificial Intelligence or any other algorithm would actually take ethical consequences seriously, because they’re not doing this enough at the moment.” He added that some tech leaders accept that AI approaches such as large language models are too complex to be thoroughly tested before use. When such attitudes prevailed with drug tests, we ended up with Thalidomide. Even well tested, medicines such as Oxycodone can be misprescribed. The same applies to AI when it is applied beyond contexts where it has been shown to work (or not).

“There are two possible outcomes; AI becomes more humane and that generally software development develops a much better grasp of human issues. … I would really hope to see that human focus getting a much better purchase.  We’ve still got a long way to go, but if you look at government digital service, a lot of the online government services are designed to such a high standard because they have taken it seriously. Either AI becomes more humane, or we’ll get another AI winter, people will just realise that it doesn’t often work, and you can’t always get it to work, particularly when it’s based on a massive neural network that cannot be understood as regards its workings and consequences.”

Looking back at his career, Gilbert highlights one of his proudest achievements as when teaching in a comprehensive school. He says: “I had a remedial social science group and I got them all through their CSE exams, apart from two who didn’t make one exam (I’ve joked that they were somewhere else together as a couple). Passing just did so much for their self-esteem.  The students were really happy, their parents were happy, my colleagues were just amazed, because these were kids that everyone else had written off. So that still remains one of my proudest achievements in education.

I’ve always liked teaching, and I’ve always taken my teaching seriously. I received a student-led teaching and learning award at Northumbria for my last piece of teaching. Surprisingly for someone that’s worked across the board, I think teaching is something that brings me a lot of pride and I’m friends on Facebook with a lot of our graduates and I can see where their careers are going.”

I’ve done quite a few clever things in research, but I can’t say I’m particularly proud of one of them more than anything else because I’ve worked in so many different areas, there’s a highlight in each one.”

“If there’s a degree apprenticeship, do it.  It’s far better to learn on the job than only in a classroom.  If you can’t find a degree apprenticeship, find a good design school where you’ll get a studio-based education. Only choose computer science or engineering departments, if you really want to do computer science or engineering, because the design skills are the really important ones.  Your craft skills you can keep up to date, technology’s going to change anyway. You really need to find practical ways of working, whether it’s a sandwich degree, or a degree apprenticeship where you can combine academic study with actually doing the practice.  The great thing about studio culture is that students learn off each other.”

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley