Recently, I had to write a bio for a not-work project I’m doing. I’m doing interaction design for the project, but I’m doing it for free in my (hah!) spare time, and I don’t want it to seem like my employers are involved or endorsing it. So I left out their name and what I’ve done for them, and I sent the draft to Shana, my PR go-to person. She made a couple of minor edits, and then said, “OK, you don’t want to mention your job, but don’t you want to talk about what you do?”

I said, “I did! It’s right there in the first sentence! ‘Michele Tepper is a digital interaction designer and usability expert.’”

She said, “Yeah. I don’t really know what that means, and I’ve been listening to you talk about it for years.”

This is an interesting problem — sure, good design is (usually) invisible, but if you don’t know what sort of design it is that you need, how can know how to ask for it? No one but my sister goes to the legal site she told me about, where she consistently chooses the wrong button because of where it’s placed, and thinks, “what this site needs is an interaction designer.” Also, I think “interaction design” sounds too much like “dancing about architecture,” to be honest. But what are the better options? My current job title, “design analyst,” sounds like I have coffee makers in once a week to obsess about why they aren’t better liked. “Information architecture” is a little ponderous and not, in this age of rich internet applications, fully descriptive of what I do anymore — sorry, Lou. “User experience designer” sounds like marketing. My mom once bragged that I was her “interface guru,” but as much as I loved that, I don’t think it’ll catch on.*

So I was intrigued by Alex Ross (the critic, not the artist, you nerds) and his attempt last year to rebrand classical music as awesome music. How excellent is that? It’s even finally gotten some traction, with this weekend’s Awesome Music Live concert. Don’t worry, newcomers! It’s not boring, it’s not incomprehensible: it’s awesome! I think when talking to non-technical audiences, I’m going to try referring to what I do as “awesome design” — it won’t be any more misunderstood than anything else, and it might lead to some good and fruitful conversations.

*And yes, I am aware of the irony of the group of people charged with making things easier to use and understand being unable to decide what to call themselves as a group, but I think that’s actually a condition of having a large group of people who care deeply about the nuances of labeling: something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, except without all that math.