This is Interaction Design
As seen from the first day of a Masters in Interaction Design
A seismic shift occurs in your thinking when you move from believing that a user should change to accommodate the design to believing the design should change to accommodate the user. After Don Norman pointed out all the flat, sleek, and beautiful door handles that confuse us as to whether we should push or pull, I saw them everywhere (1). The designer who selected these beautiful but exasperating door handles and the interaction designer are both concerned with the system. The door handle designer wants the door handle to fit aesthetically with the clean façade of the building, perhaps conveying fast-paced industry or progress. The interaction designer is also concerned with the aesthetics of the handle, but insofar as it guides the bank customer through the door and to the bank teller to deposit their check. In interaction design, the door handle is just one component in an ecosystem that can be designed to create a positive experience. Ecosystem is the key word because interaction design’s defining feature is not just the static elements created but those living elements — namely humans and how they fit in.
The term ‘interaction design’ arose out of the growth of technology, but it is a definitively human discipline. While we certainly can be aided by machines, we do not and cannot ever think like machines and so it is important as we design machines to automate our working and living life that the creators are considering the reciprocations from a human context — on an individual and global scale. For this reason, interaction design champions collaboration. This collaboration takes many forms — with other designers to encourage exploration and examination of assumptions but also with stakeholders and users so that their needs are quantified and they have a stake in the design process. While many today may decry the abundance of meetings, a designer knows that a meeting done well is a necessary part of a productive design process.
Perhaps interaction design is best thought of as a particular lens from which to view the world. In an essay on design thinking in management, researchers Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Fred Collopy write that design thinking is an alternative to the traditional “decision attitude.” To think as a designer is to have a more expansive, exploratory attitude (2). Rather than training you to select the best from the available options, design thinking encourages you to start with the creative exploration process and let that guide your decision making.
- More on this in Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.
- Quoted from the essay Design Matters for Management in Managing as Designing.
