Revisiting "interaction design"
Amidst the malaise with UX & tech, maybe hope comes from the past...
Recently I was re-reading essays on design, from my time at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate program on interaction design circa 2000-2001, truly at the turn of the century. ⏳ 🤓 In particular was Dick Buchanan’s ‘Design, Making, and a New Culture of Inquiry’ which articulated how he saw CMU — after having already spent 10 years there — as an innovative university leading a necessary, important inquiry into deeply complex challenges across humanity and technology, for which design can offer a valuable approach.
Specifically, Buchanan called out interaction design as
“…the third great field of design to emerge in the 20th century. It combines qualities of visual communication and information design, which are characteristic of traditional graphic design, with the qualities of the whole body experience in a physical environment, which are characteristic of industrial design.”
Continuing on, he explains the essential value of interaction design:
“Interaction design is about people: how people relate to people, how people relate to products, and how people relate to each other through the mediating influence of products. It is a synthesis of many traditional and new elements of design thinking, organized into intelligent and emotionally satisfying experiences that meet a wide variety of human needs. Products are no longer treated simply as physical artifacts or visual symbols. Instead, they are expressions and enablers of human action and experience, situated in a social and cultural environment. For many of us, interaction design is more than a new branch of design practice. It is a new approach to design thinking in general, and a foundational critique of the entire field of design and the place of design in culture.”
Going further with interaction design itself, in my personal view it is at its most valuable as providing perspective, a set of methods, and the basis of human-centered principles. This is what genuinely adds to the depth & richness of possibilities for improving the human condition through artificially mediated (read: technological) means. Let’s take a closer look below…
🔎 Interaction design provides perspective: This refers to viewing a problem (or opportunity) as a contextually informed situation, shaped by dynamic relationships among person - activity - task - objects - goals. It involves understanding the dialogue between a person and “the other”, whether it’s a device, an interface, a process, a brand, etc. Ultimately, interaction design can be a way of interpreting problems, in all their multi-layered glory with an empathetic, culturally or socially framed manner.
There’s an undeniable ecology of consequence of evolving priority & impact to be considered in assessing a problem or opportunity — truly seeing the “interactions” at play.
🧰 Interaction design offers a set of methods: This refers to diverse approaches to unpacking a problem and then exploring potential solutions, as typically associated with digital interaction design (HCI, UX, etc.). This includes scenarios, personas, taskflows, mapping/diagramming, storyboarding, and prototyping, to help tease out important nuances, in an iterative fashion. All of this, of course, focuses attention on the relationship between people and objects and goals, towards their existing and expected outcomes.
Through such methods, we can learn: What are any inherent dependencies or pliable assumptions? How can they be accommodated or improved upon in a given situation?
🫶🏽 Interaction design enables humanistic principles: This refers to the inherently human-centered aspect of designing good products & services, based upon essential principles of humanity: trust, dignity, beauty, empathy, emotion, story, delight, and so forth. These could also be described as virtues, to borrow Marty Neumeier’s phrasing from his book The Designful Company. A product’s quality of embodying humane, virtuous interactions (or for a service, process, brand, etc.) guides and shapes its value, since truly good interactions resonate with and build upon what enables people to thrive in their day-to-day of living, working, learning, playing, and so forth.
How can such interactions enable people to live their lives on their own terms, with fulfillment, optimism, and confidence? This isn’t about a quantified data point to maximize revenue. It’s about enabling lived values.
I find it rejuvenating to remind myself of all this — a much-needed break from the disheartening grind of “UX mechanization” led by engineering-centric velocity, revenue-driven metrics, and an emerging sense that UX (now mostly reduced to tweaking Figma files for testing) merely exists to achieve tactical, myopic targets. 😬 People writ large are now quantified into addressable markets of marginal growth, becoming simply observed clickers of the CTA button. 🙄 Not good! This dystopian view of design’s impact & value completely inverts what interaction design was meant to be — so it’s up to us to re-assert those original interpretations as re-discovered aspirations. ✨