During a panel discussion at the UPA Boston miniconference on Wednesday — humorously dubbed by Chauncey Wilson as “Cranky Geeks Complain About the Field” — the audience was encouraged to voice their own concerns about user-centered design for consideration by the three panelists. One comment that stirred up some discussion was a desire for art to be a more central part of our work. (It is “design,” after all, the thinking goes.) Thoughts of iPhones and Michael Graves-inspired housewares, no doubt, were swimming through everyone’s mind, but I got a little uncomfortable. After a lot of reading, and an increasing amount of contact with other practitioners, I’ve come up with a decent mental model of what an interaction designer/user experience engineer ought to do, and art, while important for the end product, isn’t central. Neither for that matter is technology… or business.

In fact, that’s the whole point.

At another session, I was impressed with the term “mastery of materials,” borrowed almost certainly from the industrial design world. The designer doesn’t manufacture widgets, doesn’t dictate the business requirements, doesn’t use the paintbrush. He does, however, have intimate knowledge of what to expect from each building block available to him — whether it’s CSS, textiles, AJAX, extruded plastic, or a glowing screen. Mastery of materials.

The interaction designer need not learn the gritty details of PHP, Ruby, or JSF to know what heights a web application can reach, and he need not have an MFA to know how beautiful a pixel-perfect mockup can be when crafted by a graphic designer. (He certainly needs to know when to involve those specialists in his process.)

In the middle of management, programmers, artists, and marketers lives the interaction designer, pulling in requirements, limitations, possibilities, ideas, and criticism to generate an actionable vision for the implementation of a product.

At the end of the day, 99% of user experience work does not result in jaw-dropping, award-winning artistic masterpieces. It’s ecommerce checkout systems that don’t suck, or group collaboration tools that smoothly integrate with the rest of your life, or cell phone text message input that’s easy to use on the run. There’s a huge need for this bread and butter user-centered design. I’m decidedly not an artist, and I’m certainly not discouraged by that.