What is Interaction Design?
Written for Interaction and Service Design Concepts, a course taught by Molly Wright Steenson at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design
Technically speaking, Interaction Design is a discipline that’s focused on defining the experience users have with interactive technologies and platforms. However, due to my experiences this semester I’ve come to think of Interaction Design in a much broader, and much more important, context. I believe Interaction Design — and interaction designers — will come to define every aspect of our lives. It’s the process by which some of our world’s most important social and economic problems will be solved. In short, I believe interaction design will come to redefine the world we live in.
Currently, many people think of interaction design as it pertains to the world of technology and digital interfaces. It’s easy to see why. As a formal discipline, it has only been around for the past 20 years or so. In fact, CMU didn’t even have an Interaction Design program until 1994 and it was the first of its kind. However, as I’ve come to learn, Interaction Design isn’t solely limited to what we can see and interact with on a computer screen. It can involve everything from the design of services (think Blue Apron or your favorite meal delivery service) to the design of environments (think Nest or other smart home systems). Interaction Design can be applied wherever there’s a need to enable behaviors within a system. But with that being said, there’s another reason why I believe Interaction Design will play such a pivotal role in defining our future…
That’s because technology is playing an increasingly important role in every facet of our lives. Just as industrial designers and graphic designers have shaped our everyday experiences through the designs of products and effective visual communication (i.e. physical devices, magazines,etc.), interaction designers will shape our everyday experiences through our interactions with technology. In his now famous essay titled “Why Software is Eating the World” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues that every industry will one day be disrupted by software. The use of the word “software” is important because 20 years earlier, many would have argued that hardware was disrupting the world. But now that software is changing how we interact with everything and it will require a special set of skills to make sure these products can be accessed and used by everyone. In other words, now more than ever, Interaction Design will play the most critical role in the success or failure of new technologies.
While this may sound radical, we simply need to look back at the history of consumer technology to see how we’ve already begun to see this play out. Consider the early versions of the personal computer, for example. Early versions of the personal computer were operated using text-based command line interfaces. But then Apple introduced Lisa. This was one of the first personal computers to have a graphical user interface. Soon, anyone could use a personal computer as long as they had a screen, keyboard and a mouse — having coding experience was no longer necessary. This simple interaction design innovation led to the emergence of personal computing industry as we know it today.
Today most industries have been transformed by software — and innovative interaction design solutions — in some way. The largest bookseller, Amazon, is an online retailer and pioneered interfaces like the digital shopping cart. The music industry is dominated by software companies like Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora which created the digital version of a record collection or radio station. Healthcare, financial services, marketing, telecom, defense, recruiting, education, games, etc. — all of these industries have been influenced by technology.
But interaction design goes beyond creating better visual user interfaces for products. And as I’ve come to learn this semester, as technology continues to encompass more areas of our lives, interaction designers will be called upon to define entirely new interaction paradigms — paradigms that have not previously existed before. This becomes especially true as we move further away from screen-based interactions. This is already happening in the realms of Augmented Reality, where designers are exploring the concept of digital objects and defining new methods of interacting with them in a digital space. There are designers exploring speech interactions (i.e. Alexa and Siri) in an effort to give users a way to interact with various devices vocally when they’re unable to interact with them physically (e.g. while driving, while walking around their home or office, etc.). I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to explore both of these interaction paradigms this semester.
I believe that at its core, technology will continue to drive much of the innovation across industries in the coming years. But I also believe that it is the interaction designer that will make this technology accessible and useable by the vast majority of people. Interaction design is what will allow companies to differentiate themselves from one another. Interaction design is what will help a new product go from being an mere experiment to a mass market success. And therefore, I believe that interaction designers will be critical to redefining the future that we all live in.
