While I think you’re right on saying that design is about what you can do for the user and advertising is about what you can get from the user, those two ideas don’t need to necessarily exist in separate worlds.

On one hand, I’m thinking of the interactive advertisements that I see when watching TV shows online. Sometimes an advertisement can be educational and useful (or even just entertaining) but the interaction design must be solid in order for the advertisement to be valuable to either end of the equation.

As our lives become more and more devoured by digital media, thinking of advertising without the minds of interaction design is as scary to me as perhaps the concept of the two merging is to you. I want an interaction designer in charge of the advertising that is going to show up on my mobile phone, where the screen real estate is so small. I want an interaction designer to make an advertisement that is useful to me, the user, and makes me trust a brand because I like their advertisement. After all, advertisements are becoming more and more products within themselves. Thus, advertising is become more about what you can do for the user, and why the user should spend time interacting with your advertisement.

Great article.

And in some ways, boundaries blur – and we have all find use in that. Example: This is a fantastic ad, but it’s not selling a product to buy, just advocating for a political message – here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk9IxALSfxs&feature=player_embedded I can’t watch that ad without starting to cry, and those in advertising at least to have that kind of lasting effect. For UXers, we don’t get to integrate emotion into what we produce; I’ve never had the message from a Web site I’ve built include that kind of powerful emotion.

One of the reasons why I adore Mad Men is because it’s helped me view advertising in a new light. Before I was fiercely against the discipline and only saw its evils; growing older, I see that things have their roles. This scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus) definitely shows the poetics of the practice that we don’t think of when we’re uncomfortable with advertising. Granted, it’s fiction, and stylized, but it does show us how advertising has understood the role of emotional connection – something much of design has to still institutionalize (or at least the people writing up the project timelines).

Maybe it’s a practicality – have a design and advertising talk at a neutral location, or cosponsored by orgs from both disciplines to ease issues of ethics and to make the cross-discipline talk easier.

I find it very interesting that you see design as inherently user-centered. Design has always only implied intentionality to me, or giving something form. Yes, this frequently means granting the user value as a result, but it’s never seemed to me that design required that the user benefit in any way.

In my mind this is why we always end up modifying the word in order to provide context: industrial design, graphic design, visual design, web design, interaction design, interior design, etc.

I have to admit that my understanding of the history of design as both concept and practice is woefully incomplete, so I’d love to hear if my understanding of the word has any historical validity, or if I’m just reacting (badly?) to the way I’ve seen the word “design” used around me.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I think great design is about understanding user needs and business needs, and creating something which delivers on both (with inevitable trade-offs).

Just like great design, great advertising can expose us to things we find delightful and useful. Misleading advertising can get us to buy stuff we don’t need. But design can be as misleading as advertising. We often buy things with no advertising interaction, only to regret the purchase later. We were sold on the design.

An area where the two might have common ground is in branding. Products communicate messages, much like advertising and creating specific qualities in the product can help create/strengthen the idea of the brand. Maybe advertising can help us think about how to communicate those qualities?