Me, Myself and IxD
Redefine Interaction Design
A New Perspective
At last, the final weak is coming! We’ve explored lots of design theories and principles for the last 15 weeks. We also had some time to get to know a whole new perspective of design including speculative design, social technology, design for behavior change and so on. I believe that all these design theories point the same direction; designers should be aware of the consequence of what they design, including both physical and digital products.
The most memorable themes I’ve got to know from the seminar class are Dan’s Design with Intent Toolkit and Chirag’s long paper topic — Design for persuasion. Both aim to change user behaviors through design intervention. According to their argument, designers might 1) prevent or promote actions as intended or 2) encourage users to do something desirable through explicit and implicit interventions. Although I’m skeptical about explicit intention of ‘social innovation’, still there is a great chance for designers to nudge users to get involved in innovative movements. I’m totally struck by these concepts.
I didn’t think deeply enough about the design intervention and its consequences at the beginning of the semester, but now I might add one more dimension on my definition of interaction design.
Recap
Just for a recap, my definition of interaction design started from my previous work experience. I worked on UX researches for our mobile service and get intrigued in user experience design. Although I had very limited knowledge at the beginning, my point of view has been expanded from on-screen interaction to human-space interaction that can provide emotional pleasure.
My area of interest is travel service. Travel has always been one of the most interesting topics in terms of interaction design; it is definitely a rich topic in the sense that there are a lot of things to consider. Over the last projects, I found that people get more pleasure from emotional, nicely unexpected and unique experience. Looking through the lens of travel design, I defined interaction design as a field of design for providing pleasant experience to users.
Beyond Interaction Design
I chose the long paper topic as ‘ethnic prejudice’ and delved into the possibility of intervening people’s attitudes towards other ethnic groups. While interviewing students, I found those who have more direct intercultural experiences with different ethnic groups tend to have more specific and tolerant attitudes.
Through the research I found that interaction design should be evolved as a meticulous craft that intervenes people’s way of thinking. Yes, this is a very vague and broad concept, yet I believe that having a big vision is very important especially when designing a service. When it comes to travel service design, designers should be aware that what users experience during travels affect their overall perception of different cultures and people. I think that interaction designers might encourage users to explore/discover/enjoy the diversity of the world by introducing new types of interactions.
