On Jan 29, 2008, at 9:01 AM, Jim Leftwich wrote: > 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.
That's all fine and good and makes plenty of sense at a high level. The major issue I've had is the outward claims by some that interaction design is "bigger than digital" on the one hand, but then bypass issues that are claimed to be outside the scope of "interaction" on the other. To be fair, I don't think anyone intends that to be the case, but when people say things like "interaction design is to interface design like art direction is to graphic design," or that "interface designers draw while interaction designers don't," well... that's exclusionary. (And in the art director analogy, a bit on the absurd side since art director's are notoriously seen by many in the graphic industry as outsiders who never learned how to draw, so they tell others what to draw. I'm generalizing obviously, so my apologies to any art director's in the audience.) To me, it seems if you want to have a larger and more inclusive definition of what interaction design is, then the core skillset has to be broader as well. In this specific case, that broader definition is going to have to include visual and aesthetic at some fundamental level. Not to the degree of needing a major in graphic design, but core fundamentals that are needed that apply to interaction, especially when interaction has to be defined for technology products. Most of this core set of skills are probably found in a few books like Tufte's Envisioning Information, among a few others. It's not needing an entire Art History degree or getting into the nitty gritty of making posters with letterpresses, but certainly some level competency with aesthetic needs to be a core interaction designer skill. Why is this? I personally think has to do specifically with digital. I understand at a conceptual level how an interaction designer can help design an analog telephone or rework a service flow for FedEx. But when you start making digital products -- desktop client applications, web sites, web applications, stand alone kiosks, mobile interfaces, interfaces for the iPhone, etc. -- the aesthetic part is integral to the success of the interactive part in a way that's not easily separated, like it might be for non-digital forms of interaction design. Given that, for the large swath of people that are going to focus on digital, if they are calling themselves interaction designers, removing the aesthetic from the definition of what they do isn't going to help matters. It's fine for teams of people today to work together on the interaction and aesthetic collaboratively, but in the future, you really are going to want more and more people who know how to do both, and are trained in how to do both, even if they focus on one or the other in a team environment. Why? For the very same reasons industrial designers are trained in both form and function. If a designer is compartmentalized to ignore or not having accountability on the aesthetic at a personal level, then the definition of interaction design is narrowed vertically as a job description, even if it's horizontal as a job that applies to broader market spaces. This is the crux of the problem, as near as I can tell. At a high level, having interaction design not be responsible for the aesthetic or be a core skill of an interaction designer is obviously fine, and can work for a variety of people. But for the ones that are looking to work in narrow market sectors, like focusing on digital products), they need a broader job definition horizontally on what it is they are held accountable for in the overall design of the product. To not do so would, it seems that calling oneself an "interaction designer" does neither the designer in that position nor the field of interaction any justice. The designer silo's themselves in a way that limits what the business expects them to work on or can work on, and profession suffers from confusion on what interaction designers actually do and are best suited for, since it would be market dependent in a way that's not accessible to those not in the know. Yes. Job titles and semantics matter, for these very reasons. That's pretty much it. Does interaction require competency with core fundamentals of graphic design or not? If it doesn't, we're back to square one on the problem since a definition that excludes an aesthetic will keep people segmented in a way that as digital products evolve, will not allow the designer to gain credibility or accountability for the totality of the design. It would be like an industrial designer looking for someone else to figure out if the product should be painted blue or red. Seems odd to me if that were to be the case, and extremely limiting. And for what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that if interaction designers insist on not needing aesthetic skills for digital product design, they will find themselves phased out of the design process by those that can do more at a broader. That's just my personal opinion, it's obviously not a proven fact. We'll have to wait ten years to see if that starts to emerge. With interaction design, the desire to go broad with the core definition but exclusionary on what the skills are actually winds up limiting the designer's role in a specific market like digital product design. This limitation is only a problem if you're someone like me who wants to work primarily on digital products. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. 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