About David
My name is David Vingen, and I’m a 3rd (and final) year interaction design student at Linnaeus University of Sweden. In a previous millennium, I had the privilege of taking my first steps into the web design world, using table- and frame-based design with marquees and other fun stuff.
Design was always my forte, spending countless hours following Photoshop tutorials and making mockups never to be released. (X)HTML and CSS became my way of realizing my Photoshop creations, so I developed a decent footing therein. I made an effort to learn server-side scripting with PHP and MySQL, but never really got the hang of it.
Come the dot-com bubble, and I didn’t have the confidence to pursue web design as profession. Design and development remained a serious hobby, until a brother of mine wanted to start his own business. I offered to help, having heard about Zen Cart and other open source eCommerce platforms. A few years on I’m working full-time at the company, wading the deep waters of Magento.
The experience reignited my belief in design and development as profession, and I proceeded to take a couple of courses introducing me to interaction design, which proved to be spot-on for my propensities for design and knowledge-based problem solving.
So what about JavaScript? Well, I never really did find it central to my needs. Whatever I needed could usually be found readily made by someone, and much of its appeal at the time seemed to be novelties of less genuine value. Today, this appears different: the web is steadily proving more valuable through further interactivity and dynamic content, JavaScript being a primary vehicle for this development.
As an interaction design student, I hope to attain an understanding of the production-side of interactive artifacts, as well as acquiring the skillset to be able to realize basic projects through my own competencies. I also find the art of writing elegantly designed code with elegant syntax intriguing in itself. And also – it’s just plain fun to tinker with stuff to make stuff happen!