Author: Uday Gajendar

From Dick Buchanan’s 2001 essay Design, Making and the New Culture of Inquiry, describing the creation of the CMU graduate program in interaction design, here is the key passage focused on identifying this thing called “interaction design”:

Interaction design is the third great field of design to emerge in the 20th century. It combines qualities of visual communication and information design, which are characteristic of traditional graphic design, with the qualities of the whole body experience in a physical environment, which are characteristic of industrial design.

Interaction design is about people: how people relate to people, how people relate to products, and how people relate to each other through the mediating influence of products. It is a synthesis of many traditional and new elements of design thinking, organized into intelligent and emotionally satisfying experiences that meet a wide variety of human needs. Products are no longer treated simply as physical artifacts or visual symbols. Instead, they are expressions and enablers of human action and experience, situated in a social and cultural environment. For many of us, interaction design is more than a new branch of design practice. It is a new approach to design thinking in general, and a foundational critique of the entire field of design and the place of design in culture.

The idea of interaction design emerged in contemporary consciousness around problems of digital media and multimedia production, but it is by no means limited to the digital realm. Interaction design is equally important for traditional analog products as well as the new digital products that increasingly surround us.

Amid this week’s wanton gadget-lust furiously fueled by fanboys on Engadget and Gizmodo (among other tech-savvy blogs–and yes I admit I frequently peruse said sites for guilty pleasure!), I just can’t help but wonder about the truly historically revolutionary game-changers of the days of yore, in terms of digital interaction design. Bold creations and moments that all interaction designers would do well to learn more about and dig deeper into their origins, motivations, and subsequent evolutions, to gain a humbling respect and appreciation of the progenitors of today’s “hotness”, and also to gain a healthy sense that nothing is truly new but instead variations of common themes: enhancing humanity, maximizing efficiency, reducing inconvenience, extending cultural patterns, etc.

For example, just consider…

** Vannevar Bush’s Memex device concept when it was first introduced in an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly (not some insular gadget ‘zine! :-)

** Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project (which feels quite a bit like Google’s ambitious–almost hubristic– attempt to “organize the world’s information”) which in its genesis introduced the term “hypertext”

** Apple’s HyperCard software for creating nonlinear, interactive, hypertext ‘experiences’ well before Flash or Ajax…and the app known as Storyspace for creating/publishing hypertext projects, thus inciting a revolution of hypertext literary development.

** William Gibson’s landmark description of “cyberspace” in Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination…A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.”

But also, what about the cultural and literary criticism surrounding the creation of such objects? Beyond the tech specs and feature battles, surely there’s some culturally sagacious interpretations of the value of yet another smartphone with touchscreen interactions? Or having a Web browser literally built-into a printer? Or having automotive dashboards that sync with your mobile apps and sense your destination, with Go Walla support and Loopt friend finding abilities? Surely interaction designers can help stage a deeper investigation into the cultural, humanistic value of such techno-fetishistic contrivances, if there is indeed any?

The recent feverish rumors of an Apple iTablet suggest bold possibilities for hypertext/media that could truly revolutionize a dying industry — magazine publishing. Business model innovation for sure, combining iTunes style pricing with Google AdSense ad models, etc. But more powerful I think is what this will do for a new generation of digital literacy–fundamentally changing the way we “read” text, really becoming hypermedia in a novel, engaging form beyond just a slick laptop or 27″ HDTV screens. This concept video by Time Inc showcasing the possibilities for Sports Illustrated is quite tantalizing in that regard.

In the end it would be nice if more attention were spent by today’s digerati and nascent auteurs on the groundbreaking things that demonstrate history (writ large, against the canvas of Vannevar, Nelson, HyperCard, SmallTalk, Newton, etc.) and contained the seeds of cultural prominence, lending themselves to worthy criticism, and thus raise the bar for intellectual discourse about modern technological creations. Not ephemeral, vacuous “wow look at the new shiny shiny!” droning on about flash-in-the-pan features whose relevance barely reaches the end of a meaningless gagdet post that’s only skimmed…to flip to the next gadget post.

** Interaction Design History — a series of nicely assembled slideshows illustrating some perspectives on interaction and computing history (also of note is Marc Rettig’s slideshow about IxD history)

** 25 UX Videos — a compilation by the folks at Smashing Magazine of various informative, provocative, and all around enjoyable videos of thought leaders of the field, from Robert Fabricant to Dan Saffer to Don Norman and others, captured at the various conferences held in the past year or so.

** And some thoughts on the lessons from Objectified for hi-tech entrepreneurs, towards delivering good design.

Some profoundly wise thoughts from design scholar Dick Buchanan, as quoted from his essay “Branzi’s Dilemma”, now almost 15 years old but still firmly relevant:

The ultimate purpose or function of design in society is to conceive products which express and reconcile human values concerning what is good, useful, just, and pleasurable. However, these terms no longer possess fixed and generally accepted meanings. Their meanings are the subject of our deliberations. They are essentially contested in society at large as well as in the complex processes of design and product development, although we seldom recognize the significance of the shift and are not well prepared to deal with it
productively.

And continuing further…

Despite the continuing role of mass-production in many societies, the task is to design for the individual placed in his or her immediate context. Our products should support the individual in the effort to become an active participant in culture, searching for locally significant coherence and connection. Products should be personal pathways in the otherwise confusing ecology of culture.

And finally…

There is no reason to be unhappy with the pluralism of design explorations in the contemporary world, so long as these explorations are not entrapped in ideology and each of us may pursue our own paths in design within the reasonable bounds of responsibility, based on informed discussions of what is good, just, useful, and pleasurable. We may be distressed by some of the work that we see in graphic and industrial design today and delighted by a wide range of other work. Design is very young and has far to go in the exploration of its role in culture. For many of us, this means better understanding of the disciplines of design thinking, not merely changes in style and surface treatment.

As I conclude almost three years of posting on Ghost in the Pixel, here’s wishing all my readers a happy, safe, warm holiday season and best wishes for the new year!