I apologize for the late reply. Too much work distracting me. ;-) I agree with you, Dave, that healthy debate is a positive activity. It is not "bickering" but rather an age-old way to discover truth or at least hone our own understandings of it.
Anyways, I appreciate your non-defensive response. It is refreshing. I certainly don't want to put anyone on the defensive.. just trying to better understand how you view stuff and see if it's a view I should adopt or not. I actually think you had a gem in a recent post, specifically about he medium being key. I agree, which is kind of my point in my prior post to this thread--the medium calls for particular specialization in the field of design. People were always in a sense doing "interaction design" *de facto* when they made things that involve some kind of interaction. Design with the big D? Maybe. Sometimes. Probably not as developed as it could be and has become, but they were designing for interactions, among other things. The thing is that, as I think Liz Bacon said, software opens Pandora's box in terms of the potential for possible interaction designs. It was this medium, you might say, that was the tipping point for folks to slowly come to realize (certainly some faster than others) the need for more specialization in the interaction space. This seems to be a point of agreement now, which is good. Now it appears that what was "interaction design" (focused precisely on software) is as of late now sort of seeing how it can positively help in other areas. There are proponents such as yourself and some others that really want to push this envelope to see just how far, how many media, can be helped by the discipline of interaction design. I think, as a desire, this is a laudable goal, no matter what it is called, though it could seem like "land grabbing" by those in adjacent disciplines. I do see some tendency to dismiss or at least minimalize and marginalize the "scientific" contributors in this space. Personally, I see value in both approaches to the problem of designing things to reach the Quality Without a Name. As a designer, I would prefer to synthesize the good in all these different approaches. I think a greater respect from all sides is called for--*including the engineers* who are equally scoffed at by both the "scientific" and "design" folks. In any case, getting back to this thread, that interaction design wants to broaden its historical boundaries is good, but not, I think, good at the cost of marginalizing its roots. While the explorers may want to move on, the vast majority in this community (I don't think I speak amiss here) are in fact doing software, even ho-hum desktop, Web, and mobile stuff. (Who knew it was so passé?!) There is so much good yet to be done in these spaces. It is a shame to me that the apparent leaders (at least the more vocal ones and some well-known authors) feel the desire to move on and even shun them as somehow no longer worth their attention. Talking about Design is great and fun and important and inspiring--even talking about how it can change the world/society for the positive--but I think bringing it back down to earth, to the context in which the overwhelmingly vast majority of interaction designers, information architects, UX designers--whatever they're called--live and breathe would be far more beneficial. I think if the leaders/writers/speakers (with some notable exceptions) would stick around, they'd probably have a lot of good to contribute, and what they offer would be more valuable and readily applied to the daily work of the majority of the community. Of course, on the flip side, I think there's plenty of room for those who haven't "made a name for themselves" to contribute as well. And they'd be valuable, important contributions, too. *Everyone doesn't need to invent "the next big thing" to make a lasting impact on the profession..* Maybe, in fact, there's more challenge to be found in taking these grandiose Design aspirations and making something real and concrete out of them in the here and now, something that other designers could look at and learn from and discuss. It doesn't need to be the iPhone. Why don't we see more discussion here, for instance, of all the good work that all these 10,000 members are doing? Why don't we have more "open source" design projects--there are soo many open source software dev projects that could benefit from the expertise of folks on these lists! The veil of IP secrecy doesn't apply to those projects, so they are great opportunities to really *show* how good design can improve even the hum-drum stuff without legal concerns. Why don't we see more articles in *interactions* talking about stuff like this? Taking these great Design principles and talking about and showing how they can be applied in the context of what most of us folk do on a daily basis. Most of us don't work on green meters or umbrellas that glow at you if they're needed. We do applications. We do Web sites. Why don't we see, for example, more stuff like Quince, which is very focused on the software medium, and others--why isn't there more community participation on things like that? Luke W's book on *Web Form Design* is awesome in this sense. What could be more passé than Web forms, and yet they are *everywhere*. Drop the Web--they are a kind of the ubiquitous "dialog," Web or not, that most in these fields get to work on. I am flabbergasted it wasn't written before 2008! So anyways, yes, push the envelope. See how you can expand the horizons of the discipline and make positive impacts, but don't do so at the cost of pushing the envelopes in the medium in which the discipline was born. --Ambrose P.S. Regarding your comment about my saying "software" means "digital stuff," I certainly didn't mean it to be. It's just how I and a lot of others steeped in software think about it. Any time that the hardware provides a "platform" (a virtual space) that can be "programmed" in more than one way, it's a kind of software. I would suggest calling this stuff AI is not accurate; AI has particular meaning. I would also suggest that your seeming desire to constrain "software" to mean desktop, mobile, or Web is both odd (to me) and not at all accurate. This isn't a case of my artificially/after-the-fact expanding the term for rhetorical purposes; quite the opposite. ________________________________________________________________ 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
