Pete Hindle

I’m going to take a break from my review-writing and talk about some history.  About three years ago (2005), around this time of year (January), I had an interview for the UK’s highest educational establishment, the Royal College of Arts.

Back then, I was really interested in making interactive art pieces. In some ways, I still am, but I wanted to go to the RCA’s Interaction Design department to fiddle with computers for two years and make cool stuff, because it was the only place in the UK that had anything like the level of techno-knowledge that I needed. If you are reading this from a bloggers point of view, you might think that last sentence sounded big-headed; however, I’d just finished studying at a university famous for it’s coverage of New Media art, where several important faculty members didn’t know how to email people.

And that’s not unusual either. The ivory towers of art academia are usually full of people who retired from using technology somepoint between betamax and steam boats. So I was really hoping to get into the RCA’s Interaction Design department, as I knew that they understood Processing, Max/MSP, and other, similar programs that were emerging around that time.

What I remember about the day is waiting outside the office for my interview, and hearing the sounds of the one workroom they had as it was full of students. And, to a man, those students seemed to be alpha-male types. The workroom of the course is very cramped, and the thought of spending two years in London, stuck in a room with braying alpha males did not appeal to me.

(Above: one of the four workbenches at the RCA’s Interaction Design room. Note the use of eMac’s, Apple’s loudest computer, which are pretty unpleasant to spend any time around.)

I didn’t do well in the interview. For one thing, I had an enormous ulcer on my tongue, which hurt when I talked. I’ve never had an ulcer like it since, but I still remember that bastard thing. Also, I wasn’t a designer. I was an artist, and they really wanted designers. Thirdly, I wasn’t somebody who wanted to do bio-art, which was where they have since re-focused the course.

I didn’t get on the course, and I was a whole lot busy with other things for that two years. It was only while doing some research last night that I remembered about that interview, as I saw a raft of familar names and what they were up to now. I guess if I’d passed that course, I could have been involved with some of the new interaction design programs coming up from London, like the people at tinker.it, or thishappened.org.

I wanted to do that course at a specific time in my life, and I think I would have been disappointed if I had got in. Instead of being thrown up against the crushing reality of living in London during an economic boom, I got to experience some really great stuff in Newcastle. And some other stuff that wasn’t so great, but was important to me.

Addendum: this blog post gets a lot of hits at the start of every year… I guess that RCA Design Interactions course is pretty popular! If you’re searching for help with the interview, or getting on the course, remember: I didn’t get on. But that doesn’t mean that I did nothing for two years – I did a whole bunch of stuff,  I just didn’t get a degree from the RCA.