Building Architecture and Interaction Design: two cents on differences as a practice
As I qualify myself as an interaction designer, or at least trying to, I have certain pointers about interaction design. Coming from architectural design background, I was very much used to designing something that cannot be changed or modified once it has been built- buildings. It is very critical that the design is thoroughly investigated and deemed ‘good for construction’ before it goes to the contractor for implementation.
The ease of building a MVP/Proof of Concept in Interaction Design
There are so many tools available to develop a digital prototype for any product that you can almost make it function like a real product. This helps a lot in terms of getting user feedback and iterate. In architecture though, it is difficult to sort of build an MVP of the design, because the design itself is very demanding in nature in terms of resources. Yes you can build a scaled model, or now you have VR stuff, but still, the complexity of a real structure is really hard to replicate in a MVP for building. To put it in a mathematical way.
The ratio of Real Product/MVP is way closer to 1 in Interaction Design than Architectural Design.
The digital design, hence, can afford to be temporal in nature. In the practice of interaction design, which is mostly associated with creating digital experiences, the final product can still be improved upon, because it not as hard as dismantling and destroying a building. Also, interaction design happens to be by large a very user-centric approach because digital products are supposed to be very use-case driven. For instance, Instagram cannot be used for making payments and Venmo cannot be used for taking pictures. This characteristic of use-case driven means that user becomes a primary stakeholder in design.
Building user vs a digital product user
There is a lack of user-centric approach in architecture because a building is normally designed to accommodate humans physically, and hence a general practice of anthropometry is followed.
I mean that is not necessarily bad or reductive, it quite required as a practice to design things around human body dimensions and make sure that things are easy to grab, move or push, and there is a lot of comfort in movement around a building etc. etc.
My problem with this is a practice is, that it is very limiting.This feels as if human is a generic mammal who has a certain body dimensions and their identity is not as important.
What about thoughts and feelings and empathy? What about complexity of human emotions ? What about different moods and personalities?
And this is where architectural design either falls flat or this humanistic side takes a back seat. This situation could be an analog in digital product, where engineering and feasibility is all that is taken into account and the human centeredness of the design takes a back seat. But, it happens more often in architectural design than in interaction design because in interaction design, there are some procedural methods that sort of include certain components of human centered design, such as data driven design- which reflects user’s behavior and how the product can be tailored around that behavior, usability testing- to get a feel of usability of the product and so on.
This is what I strive to do as an interaction designer and I hope practicing architects take this as an analog for their practice.
For the interactions, I care not only about happy path, but also about empty states, error states, 404 pages, edge cases. How would a user/ customer human get from point A to point B? What happens if they wander on their own path and not follow your UX flow? What would they do once they see the confirmation page? Or don’t see that at all?
This is coming from a place where we should understand that every individual is unique and they have different preferences and methods. We should not expect one UI to be a fit for all or at least millions of people just following the happy path on your product. Human Interactivity is unique, vivid, individualistic and messy. We need to accommodate that in our designs.
To be continued……
