On Jan 19, 2008 7:54 PM, Mark Schraad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So - if I am designing the control mechanisms for an elevator that is > electric and mechanical - I am not an interaction designer? I does > seem odd to shift the definition from what we do, to what technology > or medium we do it with. > Hi
This is exactly what I asked in my post http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=24636#24678 as to where exactly is the line when an Industrial Designer becomes and Interaction Designer and vice versa. I guess your control mechanism designer is also trapped within the blurry lines of Industrial and Interaction design. Let me try and elaborate my point of view. To begin with let me first define what "Interaction" means to me. Interaction is really an exchange of communication between two entities across a medium more specifically an interface. The two entities in most situations will be human-human, human-machine or machine-machine. The quality of the Interaction between the two entities depends on the quality of the interface- how well its defined and more so how well the two entities understand it. The better the interface better will be the interaction. So that brings in what designers really do. They strive to design the best possible interaction between the two entities which in other words means they strive to create an interface that is as well defined as possible (within the constraints) and more so is understandable by the two entities to start an interaction across it. Now I will like to take each of the individual design fields and try to define what they do. Industrial Designer: Their main focus is to design an interface between human and machine where the machine is generally an electrical or mechanical device. And since there is an interface, there is an interaction. The car driver looking at a speedometer to read the speed is doing an interaction with the car (asking the car at what speed its going) where the speedometer is the interface. The guy who is standing inside an elevator is communicating with the elevator through the buttons to tell it where to go and when to stop and the LCD display which the elevator uses to communicate back to the person to tell at which floor the elevator is. Graphics Designer: Their main focus is to design a visual interface between a human and a machine where the machine generally is a information system displaying some information. The interaction is the exchange of information visually from the graphics display to the human eye. The person browsing a website to buy tickets is interacting with the website and using the graphics (including text) as the interface for communication. Please note, the end result is booking tickets not browsing through some fancy graphical design. Here again since the graphics system is the interface its facilitating the interaction. Software Designer (Not developer). Their main focus is to design an interface across which code entities (be it functions, objects, classes, operating system with the application) take to each other and exchange data to perform a meaningful task. This really is a case of machine-machine interaction as the interacting objects are two software entities or one software one hardware entity. Again an interface and an interaction across that interface and the interaction is what is of prime importance. Hardware Designer: Their main focus is to design an interface across two hardware entities say - microprocessor and memory or your laptop and cellphone across bluetooth. Here again there are two entities, one interface and an interaction that between the two entities that needs to be done. I can go on and on and take each design discipline but every discipline you take has the core focus of creating an interface for an interaction to happen between two entities. The interesting part is that facilitating the interaction is the sole purpose of each design activity and the success of each design activity is gauged by how well the two entities are able to interact using the designed interface. Which in effect means that interaction design is fundamental to each design discipline and not a discipline in itself. Interaction design exists within the context of a design discipline and not standalone. The fact though remains that Interaction design has largely been synonymous with Human-Computer Interaction design and I believe this has been the root cause of all the confusion. We took the fundamental core of all design disciplines and mapped it to the specific design discipline of Human Computer Interaction. No wonder an Industrial Designer comes up and asks why he is any less an Interaction Designer compared to a person designing the website for booking the airline tickets :-) Cheers Pankaj ________________________________________________________________ *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
