Interaction Design students solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as an Interaction Design student, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.
But if you think of cultivating Interaction Design student attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.
Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:
To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.
So, if you want to be an Interaction Design student, repeat the following things until you believe them:
Being an Interaction Design student is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be an Interaction Design student you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as an Interaction Design student. Otherwise you'll find your creative energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece — and so on, until you're done.)
Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.
To behave like an Interaction Design student, you have to believe that the thinking time of other Interaction Design students is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other Interaction Design students can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.
(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the Interaction Design students that do are the ones that get most respect from other Interaction Design students. It's consistent with Interaction Design student values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your creative skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow Interaction Design students while doing it.)
Interaction Design students (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
To behave like an Interaction Design student, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other Interaction Design students).
(There is one apparent exception to this. Interaction Design students will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)
Interaction Design students are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other Interaction Design students.
(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. An Interaction Design student may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like ‘cooperation’ that they control. So to behave like an Interaction Design student, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.
To be an Interaction Design student, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won't make you an Interaction Design student, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming an Interaction Design student will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Interaction Design students won't let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at creative thinking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.
If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself — the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming an Interaction Design student.
Original text taken from Eric Raymond's How to Become a Hacker
Inspired by Ethan Roth's TEDx talk