The phrase "interface design up to this point" and calls to limit the definition of Interaction Design and the scope of IxDA invites an examination of the term's history.
The definition of Interaction Design isn't, (and more importantly) won't *ever* be, limited to just the "digital" domain because it never was and isn't inherently limited in that manner as a practice in reality. The term "Interaction Design" itself, which was coined by Bill Moggeridge and Bill Verplank at IDTwo (one of the three companies that combined to become IDEO) in the mid-to-late 1980s, represented the design of interaction across a variety of technologies and product and system design boundaries. Interaction Design certainly involves design of any and all patterns of usage. Interaction Design was a term I was able to easily adopt around 1987, for something I'd been practicing in the design consulting field since 1983 on products, software, systems, and combinations thereof. The first interaction designs I did involved designing and modeling the interaction of users with physical components in devices and equipment that had multi-step processes. As more and more equipment began to include digital components and digital control and information, that also became part of what was involved in the interaction design. Fairly recently, an interaction design project of mine (as a component of designing medical equipment that I also did the industrial design, physical controls design, and information architecture for), involved analyzing, modeling, and designing physical components involved in the device's physical interaction that were not associate with the product's digital features and functions. To separate various aspects of the device's interaction into technological domains (presumably to be handled by separate designers, or one designers who's very conscious to take off a hat with one label and put on another hat with another label) is, in my opinion, somewhat absurd and completely overlimiting to our field as a whole. I'm happy to see Victor Papanek's name come up in this thread, as he was the head of my alma mater, KCAI's School Of Design, and left an indelible mark of wholistic approach to Design at our department. There's probably not a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for having had the great fortune to study a wide scope of Design (from typography and corporate identity to computers and software to industrial design and manufacturing technologies) and thus having been equipped to enter my career without the limiting boundaries and categories that have preoccupied so many in the field, and kept many more from pursuing the opportunity to design a greater range of the interactive aspects of products, systems, and environments. I realize that many of the members of IxDA are web designers, and live and breathe entirely within the virtual realm or within the bounds of software running on devices. This is understandable. But it's altogether another thing, and a highly regrettable thing at that, when the specialists begin to demand that the field of Interaction Design, or IxDA be similarly limited in scope. Limiting Interaction Design, or IxDA, to just the digital stems from a myopia of the non-generalists, who make up the wide part of the field's Bell Curve (due to the huge number involved exclusively in the web and software). And furthermore, I think this myopic insistence on categorization, limitation, and specialization has led to many products and systems being very poorly designed, interaction-wise. Think the vast majority of mobile phones and devices and equipment. Specialization and insistence on limited scope for something as *necessarily* all-encompassing as Interaction Design is the first step towards a dangerous "dilution of responsibility" among specialists. At best, this leads to inelegant bolted-together separate design efforts. At worst it leads to more of the type of poorly designed products and systems the world is already plagued by. I'm not that worried about Interaction Design, or IxDA, being limited in definition or scope however. There are a number of generalists that have been around for a long time that will continue to point out the value of embracing a more encompassing view of Interaction Design as IxDA moves forward and grows. As for the specialists and those practicing within specific domains - perhaps they would benefit by forming specialist sub-groups *within the larger and inclusive organization*. But it will prove impossible and impractical to artificially limit the profession that's been being practiced for decades, nor the organization that's beginning to represent us all. Jim James Leftwich, IDSA CXO - Chief Experience Officer SeeqPod, Inc. Emeryville, California http://www.seeqpod.com Orbit Interaction Palo Alto, California http://www.orbitnet.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=25077 ________________________________________________________________ *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
