About absent design

I’m Reuben Stanton, an interaction designer and developer based in Melbourne, Australia.

I’ve been operating under the name “absent design” for about ten years. The name originally came from an anagram of my name (Reuben Stanton –> absent neutron –> absent design), but now seems appropriate to ideas of using design to improve user experience by removing barriers to effective interaction: Really great software design is invisible – it quietly assists you in achieving a task.

My experience in interaction design comes from a variety of sources – I trained as a graphic designer in the late 1990s when the interactive web was a new and fledgling design playground – something about the online experience really clicked for me and I was one of the few graphic design students from my year to graduate with a genuine interest in developing for this new medium.

Around this time I also discovered an affinity with programming that wasn’t totally unexpected (I still vaguely remember writing music and making digital images in BASIC on our first family computer – a Toshiba HX-10), but was unusual for a graphic designer. There was something about the iterative logical problem solving process and the tight structure of programming languages that really appealed to me.

After I graduated I tried my hand at a whole lot of design related things – absent design was a collaborative graphic design project, a t-shirt label, an screen-printing studio  - but I kept coming back to programming (in flash, mostly) – almost by accident. When I started looking around for more permanent work (to gain more experience in the “real world” of design) I kept applying for design jobs and getting offered programming jobs instead.

I’ve now worked for seven years (or thereabouts) as a flash developer – working for a wide range of digital, design and advertising agencies including a 6 month stint living and working in Tokyo. I returned to Melbourne, dabbled in some interaction design at ACID, and worked for a year as a senior flash developer at Flint Interactive. I’ve built hundreds of good websites and bad, and seen countless examples of effective and ineffective interaction design.

I’ve often thought that “one day” I would be working on the design and development of useful, clever software. I’m tired of waiting for that “one day” to arrive – maybe that day is actually now?

So I’ve left flash development behind, and I’m pursuing the design and development of iOS apps for a while – this involves some reskilling, some learning and re-learning, and a whole lot of experimentation – all of which I’ll be documenting here.

Oh, and if (like a lot of other programmer/designers out there) you like cooking – I’m also keeping a cooking diary. And I dabble in a bit of amateur photography.

Thanks for reading.

reuben [at] absentdesign [dot] com
twitter: @absent