Online Original Content: Arspiration.com
3 New Careers: Interactive Artist, Experiential Designer, and Creative Technologist
Date: Jan 12, 2019
A decade ago, there were not many career paths on offer in a career guidance class and the same professions were always popular among students; physician, engineer, architect, painter, singer and accountant. Ten years later, we have seen many new professions appear, such as a web developer, game designer, mobile application engineer, curator and YouTuber.
Today, Arspiration would like to introduce you to some new professions which you may or may not have heard of: Interactive Artist, Experiential Designer and Creative Technologist. These three professions represent a hybrid of artist, technician and digital trend guru.
In the near future, Thailand will have a growing number of professionals employed in these industries, so we would like to talk about these new career paths with a woman who inspires us with interest about them, Tuangkamol Thongoborisute.
Tuangkamol Thongoborisute, or Tuang, is a recent MFA student from UCLA from Design | Media Arts department in the US. Although she has her degree in Media Arts, her undergraduate degree came from no other, but Silpakorn University, from which she graduated with First-class honors and the highest GPA, making her the King Bhumibol’s scholarship recipient. She began her art career as a painter before turning to new-media art at Silpakorn.
Her work uses a mix of various techniques and tools and her vision for her pieces stems from which physical interaction is the trigger, such as jumping, hand-shaking, crawling, and touching. Tuang brings that vision to life by researching an object and its function and then considering an environment for it that could trick people and entice their curiosity to get them to experiment with it using the gestures she has designed. She has learned so much about humans and our connection to each other, especially as she now resides in another continent, across the world from Thailand. A broader knowledge of different disciplines and cultures is centrally important for Tuang and she always use this to inspire her new creations.
So what is an Interactive Artist? We ask Tuang to give us her definition of this term. Tuang explains that an Interactive Artist is a creator of artwork that primarily focuses on interaction and connection between their participants and the work, or between a group of participants, and that it usually involves the use of digital technologies. Tuang adds that this term arrived in the art world when artists started using digital technologies to produce works. In the past, artists began experimenting with radio, audio and video tape, sound wave graphics and light, later using those mediums to create semi-activity for audiences. It’s different from creating a sculpture and allowing people to touch it; that may not apply to what Interactive Art is in this context.
Interactive Artist is similar to the field of Interactive Designer and “Experiential Designer.” This title might sound familiar to many who interested in events, exhibitions and landscape design. An Experiential Designer works to create a unique or particular experience for their viewer, usually in a specific environment. This is distinct from an interior designer as it requires a knowledge of how to deliver a message using installation, environment and digital technologies. An Experiential Designer must be interested in human behavior as well.
There are many other industries that incorporate technology and development, for instance, mobile applications, 3D modeling, special effects, virtual reality design and digital marketing, and positions are opening up for people with versatile skills in technology and design: Creative Technologists. We would like to introduce this title in Thai as “A specialist of creative tech.”
A Creative Technologist is a professional who understand the principle of a technology which the company or society is using and interested in developing. A Creative Technologist does not usually have fixed duties because different companies have different requirements for this position. Duties could range from researching, prototyping and testing, to budgeting, but always navigating between the roles of designer, marketer, engineer and programer. Therefore, a Creative Technologist needs to have a wide range of skills, such as coding, design, client outreach and project management and must be able to shift easily between them.
These three new professions are very exciting and for those who have recently graduated, we hope this article can be another motivation for you to follow your dream career. Although, not every profession is introduced at school, don’t forget that we can always learn from outside of the classroom. Arspiration team wishes all the best for all dream followers!
Tuang T 