Hi all,
I've been waiting for someone to take the web-design-in-large-orgs perspective on this, it hasn't happened so I guess I'll have to do it.
Sure, the site isn't that great, but to go to the lengths to suggest one shouldn't study there? For having an old (the technologies and archive trawls suggest it hasn't changed since the mid noughties) website?
It's one thing for a consultant to criticise a site, another to actually work on a site redev and have to push any changes through multiple levels of bureaucracy and programme name changes (yes, I know of sites stuck in beta for years while the design discipline names keep changing).
Were this a discussion about what should and should not be discussed on a design education website, I'd feel this was an appropriate forum. However, as it stands, I'd have much rather seen web design criticism and the like happen in a forum such as the IXDA (Interaction Designers Association). http://www.ixda.org/ (For those interested in things web-devvy, it has free membership and highly recommended, even if Twitter and FB mean it doesn't have quite as many posts as it used to). I know at least one member occasionally chimes in with his perspective from working on the US military site: that's a real eye opener in terms of both levels of sign-off and their design constraints.
As it stands, this argument reminds me much of the Dustin Curtis vs American Airlines website story, as chronicled on Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/how-self-defeating-corporate-design-process-one-designer-finds-ou
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