As everybody knows, the last 14 months have seen the world of new media roundly beaten and dragged into reality. Now that it is out of intensive care and walking around on crutches much of the bravado has gone leaving many more thoughtful about how it all happened.

In the mid-nineties the USA got well and truly hooked by the Internet, dropped their armfuls of CD-ROMs and jumped online. Fuelled by free local phone calls and an infatuation with anything new, the focus shifted from an exploration of a new medium to displays of technical prowess and business lunacy.

A great indicator of this mindset is the abundance of useless gadgets on home shopping channels. These apparently replace the need for any talent or skills for the task in hand. This is the approach that has eaten away the heart of much design in new media. One of the problems with software staples such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash et al. is that they make our lives as designers much easier. This contradiction gives rise to the temptation to rely on tricks and filters which tends to put design through a "blander" so that everything has started to look the same.

Matt Willis, of 72ppi and Animal Logic is one of the core members of Australian InFront. He feels that "the industry isn't promoting concept as the core element when designing, so designers are falling into the trap of software generated design. I still, to this day, have not seen a job advertisement where the hiring company seeks a creative mind and software skills come second."

Another problem is the constant revision of the software. Most designers use a fairly large suite of software with many upgrades arriving within less than a year of the previous release. This makes the learning curve incredibly steep and never-ending. By the time you have learned an application's bugs and idiosyncrasies, another version appears and the process starts all over again. It's like walking the wrong way up the escalator.

Concert pianists can forget about the mechanics of playing the piano and focus on expressing the music, which is where new media design needs to head. The nightmare of designing anything that is truly compatible across all platforms and web browsers makes web design an enormous production task above all else. Willis is not alone when he advocates "killing the browser" so that content (such as the recent BMW online short film campaign) is delivered via the Internet but remains independent of the browser. Perhaps when the dream of broadband is fulfilled this will become more commonplace.

Interviewing potential designers has often been startling. "Experienced" is often equated with software skills rather than time spent in the industry. A frequent occurrence is for designers to tell me how fantastic they are at Photoshop or Flash. But as Bruce Carter, Creative Director of Animal Logic says, "that's like saying I'm great at using a 2B pencil. It's meaningless."

Prior to the dotcom crash many design graduates were expecting to walk into highly paid senior positions with enormous amounts of creative control. The creative process frequently amounted to a quick surf on the web to see what others have done. Frequently this is encouraged by unrealistic deadlines due to the client's pressure of "time to market" and the mistaken idea that because something uses new technology it is inherently great.

So has design education fallen foul of rooms brimming with shiny new computers? Rick Bennnett, lecturer in the Bachelor of Design at UNSW's College of Fine art and Creative Director of their in-house studio The Fridge, disagrees. Although he admits that colleges are full of technophobe lecturers, there is a great deal of process driven teaching. Part of the problem is finding people to lecture because education has the same problem as the design industry. "The ones who know their stuff are usually very young and therefore their teaching experience is limited and the ones with the experience are too set in their traditional ways", says Bennett. "But however much of huge advantage software skills are, ideas are still more valuable than technical skills."

Looking critically, there has been little in the way of design innovation over the last four years on the web. Most of the "new" techniques and tricks in Flash (which itself is a reaction to the dreadful medium of the browsers) have been seen offline in Macromedia Director and CD-ROMs some years earlier. Many young designers have only ever known the web but, as our parents used to tell us about sex, it has all been done before.

Interactive media itself is incredibly young. If you try very hard, and include the first computer games, it can be traced back to the very late sixties. But in most people's experience it is only about ten years old, and for many the web is something they have discovered in the last couple of years. At the same point in cinematic history audiences cowered in their seats as footage of a train screaming towards them flickered on the screen. It took a long time for the language and techniques of cinema to develop into the form of story telling we know today.

The willingness to explore and to not to be afraid to fail is crucial to the development of the language of interactive media. This means avoiding 'designer' tricks and being more engaged in the ideas. Bennett believes that "designers who have spent time in the fine arts produce far more creative work, they are far more willing to make mistakes and experiment."

Justin Fox, another founder of Australian InFront is looking for emotion. "I have still to see a website that has made me cry", he says. I have to disagree. I have seen many that moved me to tears, but for all the wrong reasons.

We need to put aside the technology and think about what we want to do with it. Get outside and look at the world, use a pen and paper before sitting at the computer. Software should become simpler not more complex. Perhaps then designers gain control of their art and start to define a truly new medium rather than re-inventing old ones.

Andy Polaine is a freelance designer and creative consultant based in Sydney. andy@polaine.com