I, too, agree with Christopher's great example there. You can design experiences - anyone who has set up a romantic evening or gesture has done this. The fact that this is sometime fodder for things to go terribly wrong (choose your sitcom) shows that it's not always perfect, but often the designer's projected, imagined experience aligns 'enough' with the recipient's experience. The skill of an interaction/experience designer is making that match as close as possible surely?
The art and design differences aren't helpful to bring in here with regards to interaction design. Artists working with interactivity are designing, whether they don't like to use the term on not. Not understanding this aspect has led to a lot of awful interactive artworks. The artists that do understand it have created some brilliant works. They design and prototype and test and modify their work until the elicit the experiences they want - it's no different from what a designer sets out to do. The desired responses are somewhat different though (for example, confusion might be what the artists wants rather than it being accidental). It's important to separate out the psychological interaction that we have with anything we encounter on a semiotic level from interaction design. Otherwise you end up with a definition that "everything is interactive", which is a self-referential black hole. It is clear that something else is going on when you physically interact with something and that this is different from, say, just viewing a painting on the wall. That physical interaction - which might be just a mouse movement or click, but might be a full body gesture - is the defining component to interactive media and interaction design. It plugs into the way with think about the world in terms of physical metaphors - c.f. Lakoff and Johnson. (I have whole chapters on this in my PhD (nearly finished) that I hope to put online soon where I go into it in more detail.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=40695 ________________________________________________________________ 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
