Perception of Interaction Design
It is overwhelming how even after hundreds of introduction sessions since my first day at the School of Design here, I still have to ponder over before writing about myself! So, Hi, I’m Nehal, a qualified Architect from India and an Urban Designer by practice. You would generally find me curiously exploring something in my cozy corner. I am not much of a speaker, but great at observing, listening and analyzing ideas. I greatly believe in completing a task at hand with sincerity and perfection. Also, I’m a live GPS! If your Google maps stops working, call me.
Interactions happen all the time, everywhere; consciously and unconsciously. What has changed with the development of mankind is the subject of these interactions, from once being only between humans to now additionally being between human and a faux entity proficient at responding back. We have engineered the entire digital world and I feel the task at hand is to make it people-centric and “architect interactions.”
For me, design is the right balance between aesthetics and serviceability. It is a problem-solving tool to make the end product completely transparent and honest to its purpose. My notion of a good design revolves around a saying by Architect Buckminster Fuller, “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
I remember our architectural design professor saying, “if you need to label every single room and directions in your building, you have gone wrong with your design. Design should be intuitive.” Thus, I bring the responsibility of conceiving spaces that add value to human experience with a sense of orientation, navigation, and way finding within spaces. I believe that the relationship between architecture and interaction design is undeniable. Having worked majorly on the physical built-environment, I feel though the thought processes between these two realms is nearly indistinguishable, a lot has to be explored in the digital environment.
