What is Interaction Design?
Following is a personal reflection on the qualities that make up design followed by an exploration of the definition of interaction design.
What is Design?
Design vs. Art
I was 25 when I first learned about the field of design consulting. Prior to that, design was a very loose concept to me. However, I read an article in which the author described art as one-directional sometimes, but design as two-directional always — it’s always designed for a person. That simple but fundamental insight shifted my thinking and I started to see how the gap between my current work in consulting and where I wanted to go was angled toward design.
Design is anchored to the needs of other people.
Limits of Analytical Methods
In consulting, you’re trained to analyze organizational problems, discover insights through analytical research methods, and justify and support your “recommendations” with data. However, when the problem is systemic, cultural, or social, 1) I believe these methods do not uncover the insights that are needed to address the issue or change the situation, and 2) they limit the generative thinking needed to come up with new solutions.
Design is/includes the process of generative thinking for its solutions.
Strategy vs. Implementation
Project teams tend to be divided between the strategy folks and the implementation folks. While there’s some underlying tension between these two groups, it’s safe to say that both are important for a successful project and in my opinion, implementation is harder (although good strategy might be rarer). In any case, this leads me to another key point of design…
Design requires execution of a process to create a tangible or intangible artifact.
What is Interaction Design? (WIP)
Interaction design is a discipline for designing artifacts, services, systems, and environments which are created for a defined purpose.
Interaction design is different from interactive design. Interactive design referred to new advances in web design, motion graphics, etc. While interactive design is more about moving images on a screen, interaction design is more about creating the opportunity for a human-driven interaction to occur. To this extent, interaction design is somehow interesting because when designing, it asks for a broad imagination and ability to consider all the ways in which the interaction could happen.
Usually it has a purpose (turn that cube around) although that is not always necessary (as is the case in more experimental design projects). If the purpose is just to experiment with interaction, then anything goes. However, in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, there are purposes in the design.
Within the industry, I believe that interaction design exists in the form of designing artifacts such as gadgets, services such as ride sharing, systems such as Slack, and environments such as ATM kiosks.
In the industry, Interaction Design is different to User Experience (more about research), Interface Design (limited to interface), Front-end Development (more about technical coding ability) in that it follows the interaction all the way from top to bottom, including designing the structure and some coding. Depending on what is being designed, the scope of what “top to bottom” means could be very expansive.
