I think I'm one of the "some people" Andrei refers to. I'd honestly be surprised if more than a handful of people here see Interaction Design as extending beyond the digital. If they occassionally show up I'm sure they quickly get turned away. Such designers exist, moreso in Europe than in the US, but this isn't exactly a hospitable environment for their voices. In my experience the community has been reflexively hostile to anything beyond a digital worldview, going all the way back to Dan's first Signal Orange post in 2004.
I'm not really wild about the idea of defining disciplines but if you're going to do it, it doesn't make sense to base those definitions on the medium. Constraining interaction design to pixels and bits is like constraining graphic design to paper and ink or industrial design to glass and metal. If disciplines were tied to their history, graphic designers would still be working in chromolithography. Graphic design more properly encompasses a world of symbols and images. Industrial design? Form and mass. Interaction design? Actions and behaviors. Graphic designers can ply their trade on a letterpress just as validly as they can with pixels--or with skywriting for that matter. Subdisciplines can develop. Logo designers and typographers and poster designers can co-exist without threatening each other because they're united by a common understanding of the foundation of graphic design. The medium doesn't define the discipline. Our discipline revolves around behaviors and actions. It can involve buying airline tickets at Expedia or buying them from an agent at SFO. The same thinking that results in customer flows at the iTunes Music Store can be applied to customer flows at a Virgin Megastore; working with architects instead of programmers. As a discipline we need to learn more as we begin to work in different media. The patterns are out there and have been for years. What kind of spaces encourage interaction? What kind discourage it? It can be something as simple as the arrangement of chairs in a schoolroom. Tactics differ, deliverables differ, but at their core are about designing useful, usable and desirable interactions for human beings. There's a case study coming out soon in Design Issues about work Ziba did for a prototype FedEx store that serves as an excellent example of the potential for this kind of collaboration. Does it make sense to try to contain this scope within a single discussion list? Maybe not. I'm not an industrial designer, but graphic designers have plenty of specialized places to discuss craft. It's clear to me that IxDA has become a defacto forum for discussing matters of software interface design. I've heard the arguments that interface design is about form and not behavior but to me that's not compelling. Good interface design encompasses both. The book Tog on Interface describes a great example of interface design involving a set of checkboxes that needed to ensure at least one option checked. It's a fascinating story but the team clearly wrestled with matters of both form and behavior. So why isn't it an example of interaction design? To me, the biggest gulf in our understanding is this: I believe that interface design differs from interaction design primarily in its focus on the artifact, regardless of whether that focus is on form or behavior. It didn't strike me until a few months ago, but when people on this list talk about behavior, they're almost invariably talking about the behavior of the artifact, not the human behavior it facilitates or requires. When the MacOS login box shakes its head "no" at me, I consider that a great example of interface design, but not a significant example of interaction design; it's just a clever animation. Text messaging on the other hand is a phenomenal example of interaction design. Dead simple interface, especially before T9 or other type-ahead conventions became common. But completely unprecedented interactions: Two people communicating non-verbally in nearly real-time across space and on the go. The interaction it facilitates is the key to its popularity, not the interaction with the artifact. Here's a good shibboleth for recognizing interaction design. Does it actively change patterns of social behavior? The telephone? The elevator? Fundamentally reorganizes business. Friendster? Twitter? Reifies your circle of friends. The post-1972 US presidential primary process? Crazyness. Starbucks installs WiFi? There you go. Birth control pills? Absolutely. Recycling? Huge. Adobe invents Postscript? Revolutionary change. Ebay? Connects and empowers people all over the globe--regardless of the interface. I don't remember where I read this recently but during the early days of electrification, people were always tremendously excited at the idea. "The electricity is coming," they would say. But gradually, as electricity became more common it faded into the background and people began to take it for granted, focusing instead on the changes it afforded. People will eventually take the ability to manipulate the digital world for granted. We've got elementary school children who are becoming progressively more competent authors in this domain. Today, what we do in the digital medium is incredibly important. Tomorrow we may wake up with all the cachet of a telegraph operator. But as long as interaction design is concerned with problems of timeless human behavior it won't be going anywhere. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24685 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
