Interaction Design - brief intro about:reader?url=https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-...

interaction-design.org

Interaction Design - brief intro

18-22 minutos

The aim of the following chapter is to provide an introductory

overview of the concept and the field of interaction design, loosely
grounded in historical developments. This encyclopedia covers the
full gamut of human-computer interaction (HCI), and it should be
noted that interaction design covers only a part of the HCI field. My
intention here is to provide a frame of reference that can be used
in reading other, more substantial chapters to start filling the notion
of interaction design with solid topical content. This chapter itself is
brief and superficial, paints with a broad brush; yet it is my hope
that it conveys some of the key characteristics and considerations
of interaction design, thus informing the reading of the topical
chapters.

In his 2007 book Designing Interactions, industrial designer and

IDEO founder Bill Moggridge reminisces (p. 14):

I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design

discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive
solutions in a virtual world, where one could design behaviors,
animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the
equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-
dimensional objects. Like industrial design, the discipline would
start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product

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or service, and strive to create designs that would give aesthetic

pleasure as well as lasting satisfaction and enjoyment.
I gave my first conference presentation on the subject in 1984,
and at that time I described it as “Soft-face”, thinking of a
combination between software and user-interface design [...] we
went on thinking of possible names until I eventually settled on
“interaction design” with the help of Bill Verplank.

-- Moggridge, 2007

The interaction design label remained relatively marginal until the

mid-1990s; the design community largely considered the
behaviors of the virtual world to be a specialty within industrial
design. During this period, academia as well as ICT industries
were mainly occupied with usability and human factors
engineering, focusing on ways to operationalize psychology and
ergonomics into methods for creating efficient and error-free
interactions to support work tasks.

1.1 Five major characteristics of interaction design

With the increasing penetration of the Internet, the advent of home

and leisure computing, and eventually the emergence of digital
interactive consumer products, the two cultures of design and
engineering gravitated towards a common interest in discretionary
use and user experience. Towards the turn of the century, the
notion of interaction design started to gain in popularity as a way to
acknowledge a more designerly approach to the topic - going
beyond pure utility and efficiency to consider also aesthetic
qualities of use, for example.

Since then, a plethora of professional practices, academic study

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programs, literatures, networks and venues have formed under the

umbrella of interaction design. It goes without saying that there are
many different understandings of exactly what interaction design
is. I don't see any real point in surveying all these definitions but
instead I would like to offer a very simple formulation of interaction
design, devised to capture the heritage of the term as outlined
above and at the same time draw some demarcation lines to
indicate potential edges of the field. It goes like this:

Interaction design is about shaping digital things for people’s use

This is indeed a simple formulation. However, as we shall see in

the following where I discuss one of its elements at a time, it is not
entirely without power of discrimination.

The notion of shaping is used consciously to suggest a designerly

activity (as opposed to, e.g., “building” which suggests
engineering, or “making” or “creating” that could refer to more or
less anything). More specifically, I find it to be a distinctive trait of
interaction design that the gestation process is a Design process,
in the capital-D sense of the word. This in turn implies five major
characteristics.

1.1.1 Design involves changing situations by shaping and

deploying artifacts

In other words, design is about transformation and the means

available for the designer to initiate change in a particular situation
is ultimately the designed artifact.

For interaction design, this connects to the notion of what the

interaction designer designs. I am suggesting the delimitation that
interaction designers design digital things - more on this below.

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What that means for now, however, is that changing a situation by

devising and implementing, say, a new political initiative could
certainly be viewed as a design act but not an act of interaction
design.

1.1.2 Design is about exploring possible futures

This seems almost too obvious to point out, but from an academic
point of view it might be worth mentioning since it entails a
fundamental difference in orientation; analytical and critical studies
focus on that which exists, whereas design concerns itself with
that which could be. This has epistemological consequences for,
e.g., how research is conducted. Framing design as exploration
also means that it often makes sense to spend time in early
phases on divergent work, essentially looking around in a design
space of possibilities before committing to a particular direction.
Exploring possible futures in interaction design often involves
inviting the future users in various forms of participation.

Claiming that design entails exploring possible futures also means

that activities like user studies and summative evaluations in
themselves do not constitute interaction design. However, they are
often used within interaction design processes, and arguably it
makes sense to consider the larger process including fieldwork,
innovation and evaluation as a design process in its entirety - as
the larger process is actually about exploring possible futures.

1.1.3 Design entails framing the “problem” in parallel with

creating possible “solutions”

From the notions of changing situations and exploring possible

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futures follow the conclusion that when we have designed

something, the situation in which it is used is no longer the same.
This in turn means that analyzing the existing in order to define a
“problem” - that subsequent design should solve - is essentially of
limited merit. Exploring possible futures implies not only different
“design solutions” but also different “problems.” For contemporary
interaction design practice, this has implications such as
reconsidering notions of exhaustive specifications before build in
favor of perpetual-beta approaches and the like.

A consequence of this characteristic is that traditional systems

development and engineering processes, where the aim is to finish
descriptive analysis for a requirement specification before creative
design begins, are not considered designerly processes. This is
quite intentional.

1.1.4 Design involves thinking through sketching and other

tangible representations

When sketching snapshots or aspects of possible futures (such as

a not-yet-existing product), the designer is not merely copying
images from her inner eye. The drawings are micro-experiments
that respond with insights into strengths, weaknesses and possible
changes in a tight loop of thinking that involves the hand, the
senses and the mind. The same notion applies for other sketching
media used in design practice. For interaction design, there are
particular implications to be observed from the temporal nature of
our design material. One of them is that when designing innovative
interaction techniques, it may be necessary to sketch in software
and hardware rather than staying with lo-fi sketching media.

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In general, the notion of sketching is more about the mindset of the

designer than about the medium used. If a particular external
representation serves to engage the designer in a conversation
about the details and implications of a not-yet-finalized idea, and if
it is quick, tentative and truly disposable, then it is a sketch. It
could be anything from a napkin drawing to a piece of
programming code, perhaps even written in the language that is
normally used to build products for delivery - what matters is the
purpose and intention.

1.1.5 Design addresses instrumental, technical, aesthetical

and ethical aspects throughout

Each of the possible futures being explored in a design process

introduces considerations and tradeoffs in all these dimensions,
and there is no obvious way in which they can be sequenced. This
holds equally for interaction design: Technical decisions influence
the aesthetic qualities of the resulting interaction, instrumental
choices on features to offer have ethical repercussions, and so on.

Historically, there has been a tendency in human-computer

interaction, usability engineering and human factors to focus on
instrumental and technical aspects. Interaction design as a
designerly activity would insist that the aesthetical and ethical
qualities can never be ignored or factored out. Whether something
looks and feels good to use, and whether it makes you
comfortable in terms of social accountability and moral standards,
has a real impact not only on the overall user experience but also
on measurable, instrumental outcomes. For an interaction
designer, users are whole people with complex sensibilities and
design processes need to be conducted accordingly.

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1.2 Digital materials and interaction design

Digital things are what interaction design shapes. This is

essentially to say that interaction designers work in digital
materials - software, electronics, communication networks, and the
like. And, as pointed out above, the digital materials pose specific
requirements on, e.g., sketching practices. When designing an
innovative interaction technique, where there is not much previous
experience to rely on, it is sometimes necessary to experiment
with constructions in software and/or hardware. Those
constructions should be made with a sketching mindset, however,
which among other things means that it is quickly made, focuses
on behaviors and effects, is disposable and ideally also that it is
one among many variations on the same theme (see above).

Historically, the digital things made by interaction designers were

largely tools - contraptions intended to be used instrumentally, for
solving problems and carrying out tasks, and mostly to be used
individually. Much of our ingrained best-practice knowledge in the
field emanates from this time, expressed in concepts such as user
goals, task flows, usability and utility. However, it turns out that
digital technology in society today is mostly used for
communication, i.e., as a medium. And as a medium, it has
characteristics that set it apart from previously existing personal
and mass communication media. For example, it lowers the
thresholds of media production to include virtually anyone, it
provides many-to-many communication with persistent records of
all exchanges that transpire, and it offers access to ongoing
modifications of its infrastructures. These characteristics of what
we might call collaborative media are only beginning to be
understood in interaction design, and one might expect that this

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will be one of the most significant areas for future conceptual

developments in our field.

By limiting the scope of interaction design to digital things

(including media), we also exclude large parts of service design,
organizational design, sociopolitical intervention, and so on. A
historical analogy may be the typical experience of an enterprise
systems consultant in the 1980s whose client asked for a new
system to manage payroll. Analyzing the current situation might
have turned up the insight that the old system as such had no
major shortcomings, but that the workflow of the personnel
department was severely convoluted and crippled. Would the
consultant propose a new system anyway, or more rightly point out
the need for an organizational development consultant? Or
perhaps even try her own hand on organizational intervention?

Similar situations are legion in contemporary interaction design, as

the use of digital technology is often deeply intertwined with other
aspects of everyday life in the design situations approached by the
interaction designer. What I propose - that interaction design
creates digital things - should be understood as a recognition of
the complexities and professional demands involved in related
disciplines such as service design, urban development and
political change. Essentially, the position adopted here is that when
an interaction design process moves into the territory of non-digital
intervention, the ideal scenario would see the establishment of a
multidisciplinary design team. In practical work, however, this is
not always a feasible option. The short-term benefits of being able
to deliver must then be weighed against the potential long-term
risks of doing a less-than-professional job in a related field.

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1.3 People’s use and interaction design

People’s use is what interaction design shapes digital things for.

As indicated above, the historical notion of people’s use was tightly
connected to workplace settings and instrumental motivations: Use
the program to get the job done as quickly, efficiently and correctly
as possible. With the growth of digital technology outside the
workplace in the form of consumer products came other notions of
use, such as using for entertainment and for pleasure. Internet
penetration has made way for use as communication, which is
arguably today the most prominent kind of use of digital
technology.

This broadened understanding of use has had a major impact on

interaction design, most notably in the rise of the notion of user
experience to capture all manners of non-instrumental, aesthetical,
emotional qualities in the human use of a digital thing. However,
following on from the heritage of digital things as individual tools,
user experience in the literature is mostly an individual construct.
Qualities that are essential social or communal in their nature,
such as ethical implications and aspects of communication, are as
yet somewhat underdeveloped in interaction design. Again, with
the development of digital things towards collaborative media, one
might expect more interest in this area in the near future.

To conclude, interaction design can be understood as shaping

digital things for people’s use. The practice of interaction design is
knowledge-intensive and multidisciplinary at heart. The chapters of
this encyclopedia provide much of the relevant knowledge that
forms the basis for interaction design practice as well as its
scholarship.

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1.4 Where to learn more

To me, the most approachable book-length introduction to

interaction design is Designing for interaction: Creating innovative
applications and devices by Dan Saffer (New Riders, 2nd ed.,
2009).

Following on from that, Sketching the user experience: Getting the

design right and the right design by Bill Buxton (Morgan
Kaufmann, 2007) offers a very useful treatment of what a
designerly approach to the digital materials means and what its
implications are in the contemporary ICT industry.

Compared to other design fields, interaction design largely lacks a

sense of a historical canon of products, concepts and designers.
This is where Designing interactions by Bill Moggridge (MIT Press,
2007) comes in. It is an admirable first step towards establishing
the much-needed discourse of the interaction design canon, and
has a lot to offer for someone learning the field.

The book Thoughtful interaction design: A design perspective on

information technology by myself and Erik Stolterman (MIT Press,
2004) introduces a number of concepts for thinking about
interaction design processes, skills and practices.

A more extensive annotated bibliography of books pertinent to

interaction design can be found at http://www.librarything.com
/catalog/jonas.lowgren

The most significant professional network for interaction design is

the Interaction Design Association (IXDA), which engages several
thousands of interaction designers worldwide. The website at
www.ixda.org offers several resources for professional learning

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and development, including a lively discussion forum. They also

organize an annual international conference called Interaction.

Academic research in interaction design is somewhat scattered

across venues. The premiere international conference on human-
computer interaction is called CHI and is organized annually by
ACM since the early 1980s. Its proceedings contain quite a lot of
quality interaction-design research, as well as other work that is
not as designerly in terms of approach and significance. The ACM
also runs a smaller biannual conference called DIS (Designing
Interactive Systems) that is more closely limited to interaction
design. Moreover, there is a whole range of conferences in related
fields where the interaction design student can find relevant
material, such as Ubicomp and DPPI (Designing Pleasurable
Products and Interfaces).

The academic field of HCI has a broad range of archival journals,

where interaction-design research is occasionally published.
Examples include Human-Computer Interaction, ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and ACM
Computers in Entertainment. Finally, the magazine called
interactions from ACM publishes many interaction-design related
articles that aim to address professional as well as academic
audiences.

The field of design research in general has less of an academic

heritage than the field of HCI, and it comes as no surprise that its
selection of academic literature is more limited. A notable
exception is the International Journal of Design, which has quickly
reached a respectable level of academic quality and which
publishes interaction-design articles occasionally. Other journals
that might be interesting for students of interaction design are

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Design Issues and Digital Creativity.

1.5 References

Buxton, Bill (2007a): Sketching User Experiences: Getting the

Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann

Buxton, Bill (2007b): Sketching User Experiences: Getting the

Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies).
Morgan Kaufmann

Lowgren, Jonas and Stolterman, Erik A. (2004): Thoughtful

Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information
Technology. MIT Press

Moggridge, Bill (2007): Designing Interactions. The MIT Press

Saffer, Dan (2006): Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart

Applications and Clever Devices. New Riders Press

Sharp, Helen, Rogers, Yvonne and Preece, Jennifer J. (2007):

Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. John
Wiley and Sons

Winograd, Terry (1996): Bringing Design to Software. ACM Press

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