Interaction Design, Before and Beyond Software
Interaction design as a term, let alone as a field of study, has only really been around since Bill Moggridge coined it in 1990. Born to make software more human, interaction design began as a way to talk about the user’s experience with the technology. It gave technologists a more defined reason to give their creations personality and emotional connection, or what Moggridge calls “wearing in rather than wearing out.”
Alan Cooper, another thought leader in interaction design, worked in technology before founding Cooper Interaction Design with his wife Sue. He talks about interaction design as a way to make software easy to use and as a way to transform everything that the software touches.
However, the principles of interaction design were in use before software. Dan Saffer lists some of these principles in Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. They include focusing on users, finding alternatives when there seem to be none, ideation/prototyping, collaborating, addressing constraints, creating contextually appropriate solutions, drawing from a wide range of influences, and incorporating emotion. These ideas come from other design disciplines like communication and industrial design, but they can also be found in experiences and services that existed before we decided to recognize them as professionally “designed”.
Having spent some time doing a service experience design internship over the summer and coming from a perspective that interaction design is about more than technology, I found myself questioning what we were doing that was new and design-specific. We were weaving various modes of interaction together to shape both interactions at individual moments and overall experiences. Among these modes, we designed for interactions not only between people and technology but between people and other people, people and environments, even people and themselves. We used methods like blueprinting, experience mapping, and service storming to collaborate on the overall experience before drilling down into the details of what each interaction would look like.
Designing overall experiences isn’t new, though. Neither is designing interactions, moment by moment. What’s new may be the way we frame these experiences and the technology that supports each interaction. I think of events like religious services, an evening at the theater, or weddings that have been carefully curated and executed, each step of the experience planned with a particular significance.
Although these events have been molded carefully over centuries, small changes creating longer evolution cycles rather than these two-week iterations that agile methodologies produce, I’d argue that they use a lot of the same principles Saffer mentions as key to interaction design. They focus on attendees’ emotional experiences; they are aware of and shaped by the context they are in; they are collaborative and iterative. Interactions between a couple at the altar, with the usher as you enter a theater, or with yourself/the spiritual at a religious service have been designed: perhaps slowly evolving over millenia, or more experimentally. We as interaction and experience designers have so much to learn from these very human, sometimes ceremonial, community-centered events. How can/should we examine these experiences, extract principles, and apply them to whatever it is we design for?
Written for a seminar on Interaction & Service Design Concepts, taught bymolly w steenson at CMU’s School of Design
