Will, that's a very expansive definition. I'm afraid if you go there, you just end up on that slippery slop that everything is design. And if you zoom out far enough, yup you end up there. All the points are human interaction points. Every symbol & bit of white space in a graphic is a moment to interact at some level with a human being by eliciting emotion or other response. By putting a sign up that says "Sale" am I not hoping to elicit a behavior of an impulse purchase. By your definitions then it is all interaction design.
Let's face it words fail us. They are imprecise, but we must bring meaning to them and we must figure out where that meaning begins and ends. These meanings also evolve over time. So far, I have heard several entymologies in this thread for interface > interaction design, but none of those actually connect to the coining of the term which more precisely comes from industrial designers use of the term and later co-opted by software designers mainly b/c industrial designers didn't want to deal with it except in very small audiences. But that isn't the point either b/c the history of the terms as we've seen is so convoluted. What is important to me and I hope to others are 3 things: 1) what do we do in practice? 2) how do we teach future practitioners? 3) how can we evaluate the work? For me #1 is a mixed bag. There are people like Andrei who control the entire experience as a single designer and there are people like me who work more compartmentalized and collaboratively with with other experts (currently industrial designers, but also graphic designers) and always with technologists. I'm sure is a continuum here. But the fact that they can be separated. (Like in children's books the story writer and the illustrator are often separate people but there are the Boyton and Sendacks of the world as well.Yes, I'm the father of a toddler.) #2 This is my new thing (well new old, but now my new focus). To me you most certainly have to have different courses for the frames and the skins. 1 there is 1 frame and there are many different skins. To translate, there is one behavioral design, but there are many crafts that can wrap around that behavior (visual, audio, gestural, industrial, architectural, etc.). This by itself means that from an education stand point we must separate out interaction from interface (or form), but they also must be conjoined in that same education process otherwise as noted above they become quite meaningless. #3 is another new biggie for me. (its amazing how the threads are coming together.) We are ok at evaluating 2 things so far in interface design: function (i.e. usability) and visual aesthetics & legibility. What we don't have is an understanding of the aesthetics of motion, interaction, and other behaviors. Is there beauty here? Are there qualities outside of "usability" in this space. I certainly think so, but I also know they are derived holistically so onion skinning the pieces is intricate and probably bordering on navel gazing at a certain level. -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34525 ________________________________________________________________ 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
