The beginning of life, interactions and everything in between (not really)
This post was written for Molly Steenson’s Seminar I: Interaction & Service Design Concepts 2016, CMU School of Design.
Humans have always been social beings. Through the centuries, we have developed and grown as a species due to various interactions and socializations with each other and with our surroundings. So when I try to conceive the origin of interaction design, I imagine it to be with the origin of life as we know it. But let’s not get too abstract and philosophical without understanding the origin of interaction design from the evolution of software design.
Before the time of Bill Moggeridge, who was one of the founders to create the term interaction design(1), “interactions” evolved as the seamless means of communication between people. The language was one tool, but what if you had a hearing disability? We formed sign language. Great! But what about people who had a sight impairment or were blind? We created braille for them to better interact with their surroundings as well as with other humans. We constantly evolve our tools to better adjust to our present limitations and environments. Samuel Morse created the morse code and the telegraph during the time of war to communicate over long distances in code language. All of these systems required thought and research and it required the creators to design an entire system of use.(2)
For Bill Moggeridge, it all started when he and his colleagues sensed an evolving practice that wasn’t exactly product design or graphic design but was rather a field formed by the intersection of the both. It had its bearings in software and science but was not completely based on those structures. The practice of Interaction Design grew more as the years to come due to the evolution of our gadgets, workspaces, and even personal lifestyle from physical to digital. The principle touch-points of our lives gradually moved from hardware to software, and that defined the need for user interface design. (3)
Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.(4) It was the design and evolution of computer systems such as ENIAC and XEROX PARC, that Bill Moggeridge sought to create meaningful order to its interaction.
Growing up in India, my defining moment of interaction design had to do with Nintendo. What a great product. It was seamless in design and usability. I would spend hours playing all those 8-bit games with my sister or most of the time without her. It was the evolution of board games for me, where I did not have to rely on having someone else to play with. My interaction could be focused with the product singularly.
The interface was simple to understand and the set up more so. It was engaging without being complex or elaborate. The best part of it was that Nintendo continued to evolve its original arcade games in step with current technology. It’s gone from wire grip consoles to movement relay technology, now with a focus on VR.
With my background studies in Industrial design with relation to spaces and environments, I began to focus design learning with a mix of architecture. I started viewing the interaction of humans and spaces as imperative to the growth of interactions in digital mediums. Interactions of people and communities, religions and ideologies, industries and economies — all were the essential force of the formation of cities. How did such a wide ecosystem, which was purely focused on human-centered design, add to the digital revolution of environments and experience? It was the birth of a new interaction study or systems and services which could be termed as urban interaction design. It gives us an opportunity to rethink what intelligent connected communities of the future might actually look like.(5) And this is exciting. It is more grounded in the social and human aspect of interaction design and is worth expanding into.
Appendix:
(1) (2) Dan Saffer, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010), Introduction & Chapter 1.
(3)Jonathan Grudin, “The Computer Reaches Out: The Historical Continuity of Interface Design,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’90 (New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1990).
(4)About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design — By Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
