What should IxDA become, do, change, evaluate, or otherwise consider?


Dan Saffer's answer is really generous towards the IxDA; like the asker, it assumes IxDA can be fixed.  I'd like to take a step back and take the antagonistic point of view and say the best thing the IxDA can do is dissolve itself.  Not that it "should" dissolve, but that the problems it has are terminal and irreparable, so all it can do is dissolve.

I'll draw a line in the sand.  In order of importance:
  • The IxDA can't stand for me as a designer because it doesn't stand for anything.
  • The IxDA has no value proposition.
  • The IxDA has a marketing problem.

The IxDA can't stand for me as a designer because it doesn't stand for anything.

What does it mean to be an interaction designer?  What do you have to know?  What do you have to be able to do?  A national organization that is supposed to represent me, can't, if it can't answer that question.  It doesn't actually matter what checkboxes you're supposed to check, it only matters that there are checkboxes to check at all.  Right now, there aren't any.

IxDA needs to draw a line in the sand and say, these are the skill sets you need to have in order to be an interaction designer.

It doesn't matter what falls on either side of the line; that can be up for discussion after they've set an arbitrary standard for the next, oh, I don't know, 24 months?  No grandfathering.  Either you're an interaction designer by the 2011-2012 standard, or you're not.

But, it can't, and it won't, because it's entirely volunteer-run and donation-supported, so it can't afford to alienate anyone.  That's a shame, because that's the only way it can truly claim to represent anyone.

The IxDA has no value proposition.

What do you get out of being a "member" of the IxDA?  What do you get out of "leading" it?  Or speaking at Interaction?  Solomon Bisker spoke at Interaction within three years of discovering IxDA.  Is he amazingly skilled?  Or was he merely motivated and that's enough when the organization is volunteer-run?

I put "member" and "leader" in scare-quotes because it's meaningless to be a member of an organization with no barrier to entry.  Anyone can be an IxDA member, designer or not.  You're only a name on a mailing list with a bad web interface, and I don't see a value in that.  I am not subscribed.

What does it mean to be a "leader" of an organization with no ability to set policy and a terminal fear of losing the donations it does get by alienating people?  How many "leaders" sign up with the intention to "change things" and realize they're mostly impotent?

The role of any organization is to do what individuals cannot.

The role of any organization is to help individuals do what they cannot do alone.  A year ago, after Jesse James Garrett's IA Summit talk, I went digging into all of the mailing list archives and reading up on as many local groups as I could find to see if there were any initiatives to provide "workshops" and "exercises" for interaction design, something like a Toastmasters, and there were two posts on a mailing list from a year before that, and nothing else.  National IxDA membership doesn't help me.  It provides neither direction, nor standards, nor recommendations, nor best practices, nor introductions, nor funding.

What about local IxDA membership?  Without national support (direction, funding, marketing, introductions, sponsorships, etc.), local IxDA is a meetup.  Saying I'm with the local IxDA chapter doesn't mean anything to potential clients, future employers, bosses, coworkers, and sometimes even other designers.

I do help run my local IxDA chapter.  But, because there's no intrinsic value in doing so, it's mostly to help the other people running it.  I'm helping the people, not the organization.  If the group name changed to "Designers Only - New Group System," nothing else would be different, and that's the problem.  The lack of value is why I've started two different local design organizations, one a hands-on design workshop http://vi.to/workshop/ and the other a local chapter of Xianhang Zhang's Product Design Guild, in an effort to create something more meaningful and relevant.

The IxDA has a marketing problem.

Meeting designers who have never heard of the IxDA is not uncommon.  I have lunch once a month with a dozen designers and every time, there's 3-6 new subscribers to the local IxDA list, because they have only just discovered that there's a whole group of people like them out there.

I haven't been a designer for fifteen years (five? six?), but I only heard of the IxDA 18-24 months ago.  Hiring managers don't look for IxDA membership.  They're not a standards and practices body, so all of the new Masters in Interaction Design programs aren't "IxDA approved."  All of the art students at the local university know about AIGA but not IxDA, and I'd bet the IA students haven't heard of it, either.

tl;dr:

Paying for membership is only the start.  The goals of the organization have to center around providing national- and local-level value for the interaction designers, from standards and practices to awareness and marketing.  It can't do that with its current structure and "membership," and rather than alienate 20,000 people on a mailing list, the most effective "we're serious about this" move would be to shut down and start over.  Consider IxDA your "one to throw away."

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