Where is Interaction Design Headed?

A few thoughts on the future of the practice.

Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash.

Interaction design has come a long way since the term was first coined in the mid-1980s to describe the design of digital things. Sitting at the edge of the second millennium as software continues to eat the world, the boundaries of the digital are becoming increasingly blurry. Where interaction design once sat in a well-bounded space of the personal computer, today even the kitchen sink is embedded with sensors and internet enabled. With this shift, designers have become interdisciplinary practitioners working across industries and organizations integrating the craft of design with systems thinking, business acumen, technical know-how, information architecture, and psychology (to name a few!) to bring products and services to market.

As we transform the world around us through embedded, interconnected technologies, we in turn are transformed into technological beings: everything and everyone is seen as a resource or function to be optimized through efficiency. This double-edged sword has delivered a world of convenience, personalization, and access while simultaneously contributing to inequality, filter bubbles, and dehumanization. Design has been a key player in bringing this reality to life via the mantra of “desirable, feasible, usable.” Through design we know how to create compelling, technology enabled experiences and in turn that technology shapes us. This interplay of shaping and being-shaped is a rich area for design to step into, inviting a more critical lens to the work designers do in the world.

In this way, interaction design can and should go beyond the technological, broadening into an experimental way of thinking that integrates signs, things, actions, environments, and ourselves in shaping our world. As we begin to articulate the foundations of what we do when we design, we can work at meta levels applying design in new contexts. The questions that arise from this start to sketch out where interaction design might go: how do we take designerly ways of knowing and doing and apply it to areas of business, policy, teams, leadership, systems, and what it means to be human in the world? To be living in the world?

Where does interaction design go from here? There are a few, non-exhaustive lenses through which I’ve been thinking about design, both today and in the future:

1. Technology: Design shapes the use of technology in the creation of digital products and services. There is a continuing role for design to play as new technologies come to market: artificial intelligence, crypto, quantum computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, bioengineering. What does it mean to design humane, life-centered systems?
2. Meta-design: interaction design as a liberal art. Applying the foundations of interaction design into areas like business, organizations, leadership, teams, systems, and complexity, as well as the art of living well in complexity. What does it mean to be human? What problems are worth our attention? How can we invite emergence? What does it mean to live well?
3. New methods: interaction design in the 21st century will require new ways of designing. Working with data scientists to design ways to ‘probe’ complexity. Connecting systems and tools for contextual understanding and fluidity. Life-centered design. Decolonization, social justice, inclusion, belonging. How do we create prototypes with the material of our situation? What new places can design go, and how will it need to transform?
4. Worldmaking: interaction design as a way of learning, giving form to unformed possibilities providing a window into various futures, exploring possibility in the form of speculative design, futures, and design fiction. What is important to us? Who is included in visioning the future? What possibilities might we live into?