Interaction Design: Conclusions
What is Interaction Design?
My answer at the beginning of class was:
To me, interaction is between two or more people, or one person + an object, an environment, or an experience. What happens when you go somewhere or when you speak with someone? You give your input and you receive their output. You process that and continue. I think the key part of interaction is this process.
Design is where we examine this process and think about how things we can create or build or plan out could affect this process. In simple terms, if something doesn’t look good to us, we can improve upon it. If a conversation doesn’t go well and leads to an altercation, perhaps there is a better way for one person to get their point across. Design is trying to learn what that is and make accommodations for the betterment of these situations. There really is no limit to where design can affect us.
Looking back on what I wrote several months ago — and I can’t believe that my first semester of graduate school is nearing a close — I realize that I had a strong, yet unspecific notion about what interaction design is.
There were many opportunities in this class to learn more and to enrich ourselves with the knowledge of what came before, what practices currently exist, and what is yet to come.
One segment of this class and learning about design that particularly caught my attention was wicked problems. Perhaps it had something to do with me being a group leader that week, but the idea of re-framing large and complex issues resonated with me. The idea that we could focus on what causes a problem and not the search for a solution where none exists is big.
It’s within that context that I feel, gives even more purpose to design. Sure, it’s always great to make things look ‘pretty’ and function better. But I feel that when the benefit of being able to make the lives around you better, I think it focuses us in a way that helps us to prioritize where and what to improve. Our resources are finite and our problems seem to be infinite.
When my group was leading the class discussion on wicked problems, while we were figuring out what to plan for the class, we came to the realization of just how connected some (most) of these problems are and wanted to share that with the class. But for the purposes of this analysis of design, it’s important for a designer to realize the far-reaching effects that his or her design may have upon people and the world around us.
Another item which really caught my attention was Dan Lockton’s Design With Intent toolkit. (Pictured left)
As with my initial statement, it was natural to assume that design could encompass anything, but Dan’s work does a great job of being subtle — it’s not about putting up a pedestrian walk signal, it’s about making sure it’s facing in a direction that forces eye contact upon driver and pedestrian. It’s not about inserting a crosswalk into that intersection, it’s about putting a raised platform which causes drivers to slow down and be more aware of the people around them.
I think these (and many others) are great examples of how interaction design can be utilized. In a sense, it works best when it’s not noticed at all. IxD seems to become most effective when it modifies both human behavior and the world which we interact with in subtle ways. Asking us to drastically change what we do and/or how we do it will never work.
I’ve also come to realize that we shouldn’t design for the sake of design. We should always be examining our work and asking ourselves and challenging ourselves to make sure we are ethically responsible designers. We need to be aware of and understand what these consequences of our designs are. Some “no-no’s” might be obvious, don’t design something that will make someone’s life more difficult. But it also seems that we’re not always conscious of some of our own discrimination that unknowingly make it into our designs. A system may not be designed to exclude a certain minority, but that still might be the unintended result.
One area of particular concern is that of machine learning and the “black box” algorithms that will ultimately decide so much of our fate in this ever so computerized world. Even thus, I know so little about how that operates. I can say things like “the coders need to be ethical” and “ethics need to be imprinted within the software systems” but don’t actually have much of an idea how that would work. But in essence, we transmit our values into what we create. And to make this world the best it can be, our systems need to be the best that they can be and should be working with us, and not against us. It’s imperative that these positive values be passed along.
In conclusion, I have found the beginnings of the study of design to be fascinating and certainly much more broad than I had originally realized. I look forward to the continuation of this study in the coming semesters of my time at CMU and in the years to come.
