IxD is, in broader terms, the real philosophical center of how interaction should be seen. Digital, non-digital, and reaching back to the dawn on man, and perhaps before.
Much of IxD is focused on computers, because it is through computers that we really began to notice our own non-sense way of interacting with each other. With anything, really. So it can be said that many things are a sub-set of IxD: Architecture, Space Planning, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Business Organization, Chain-o-command, Carpentry. IxD is a blanket philosophy, really. A method to create ANY system for ANY group that helps them achieve ANY goal. The fact that IxD came about as a way to create software betrays the really fundamental understanding that the forefathers of IxD were able to tap into and articulate. However, IxD ALSO means the software design branch that broke off of User Interface Design. And this double meaning, or double understanding of its principals makes arguments like this one somewhat moot. If we recognized a new flavor of IxD with its own unique traits, we would be stove-piping IxD even more. Restricting it from all software, down to a single kind of app. Where does it stop? Word Processor IxDs - WPxDs? Spread Sheet - SPxDs? I find the idea that IxD relates only to software and software-enabled devices to be too constricting. In the future, when these things begin to merge, this kind of thought will be the box we can't think outside of. It is why people think brain interfaces will fly text in front of your vision when you think "Search for directions to nearest good pizza place." When the real ideal would simply be recalling where the nearest good pizza place is as though you've been there. Where that thought process triggers the search and makes the information available to you using the same chained recollection system your brain already uses. I know that seems a bit out there, but this merge of meat and technology is in our future, and is worth thinking about now. Rather than trying to further compartmentalize our interaction design oeuvres. Don't forget, the world wide web hasn't existed even 20 years, and it has already moved through 3 paradigm shifts. (is moving through the 3rd) It will only become faster, and more powerful. And more pervasive. And more ubiquitous. In 20 more years, what I talked about a moment ago that seemed like science fiction might be considered obsolete and infantile. Or it might never come at all, in favor of something much more remarkable. Can you say there is value in defining a new kind of IxD for a format that might not exist at all in 5 years? For an app flavor that exists on a paradigm that itself might not be used at all in 5 years? No, IxD needs to be more forward thinking than that or we will die out. We can't restrain ourselves into this little electronic box, let alone the internet, let alone still the world wide web, and certainly not one flavor of application that is popular on it right now. Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34303 ________________________________________________________________ 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
