Reading Response (1/27) | Interaction Design [Four Ways]

As someone who hopes to enter one of the many fields strongly linked to the field of interaction design, I really enjoyed getting to have a condensed overview of its history. It was interesting to see from such a wide viewpoint how the way in which we think about the role of technology in our everyday lives has changed so fundamentally; we have flipped 180 degrees from a world where we had to change our behaviors to control the computers (and really only for computational tasks) to one where the computers are being further and further manipulated and designed in order to conform to the demands of our daily lives and desires for interpersonal communication.

Other things that stood out to me from the presentation were Mitch Kapor’s identification of software design being a design problem as opposed to an engineering problem—which made me appreciate even further the types of things we are able to study in this program—and the idea that interaction designers need to understand the context and activity around a product before we can truly assess it. I also enjoyed the prediction near the end that technology will continue to conform to us, creating dynamic, distributed content to a wider audience; we appear to have yet another soothsayer predicting the inevitable (and welcome) rise of ubiquitous computing.

I was particularly struck by the analysis of the different stages of a new technology near the beginning of this introduction, from the “Enthusiast Stage” (where only the most enthusiastic nerds like ourselves adopt the product out of sheer excitement over the advances in technology), to the “Professional Stage” (where the product is mostly bought by purchasers for large corporations to be used by the company’s worker bees), to the “Consumer Stage” (where people no longer really care about the technological advance in and of itself, but really only care about what the new technology, and more specifically the product can do for them).

Sometimes as designers we get caught up in a new tool or exciting technique and can lose sight of the average consumer that will be using the product at the end of the day. The average user will not spend more than a few minutes trying to figure out a system that isn’t immediately intuitive, no matter how “cool” the new technology is. It served as an excellent reminder that while we may have to hold off on certain techniques until another project down the road, the consumers are the ones that make any of these projects possible—and as such should be the top priority during the design process.

On a less long-winded note, I was also struck by the idea of sociability being an important goal in interaction design. It hadn’t occurred to me in such explicit terms that even if a product is intended to enhance or streamline a person’s work activities, it should support aspects of both their work and leisure time. Just because something is intended for work doesn’t mean that it couldn’t benefit from making the process more relaxing for the user.

First off, I’m still tickled every time I see or read about that marble answering machine. Sure, it may not be the most practical from a logistical standpoint and has no security whatsoever, but I just love that as an elegant example of the direction ubiquitous computing may be able to take us someday.

Regarding the meat of the reading, many things stood out to me. The authors’ emphasis on the importance of working together and effectively as a multi-disciplinary team resonated with me as it’s something I continue to work on (I’ve always had a little bit of trouble relinquishing control); it served as an excellent reminder that to create innovative and beautiful designs in this “age” collaboration is not only preferred, but absolutely necessary. The authors also brought up some design principles and user experience goals that I was intuitively familiar with but had never thought about explicitly, such as the ideas of safety (in the sense of preventing user error), mapping (I’d really never looked that closely at Play/Pause/FF/RW buttons before!), the differences between physical, logical and cultural constraints, and the concept of external vs. internal consistency in a system’s metaphors and vocabulary. These concepts reinforced how complex user experience and interaction can be, spanning fields from anthropology and psychology to visual design and logic.

Lastly the simple concept of interaction design being a constant trade-off between design principles and user experience goals was a definite A-Ha moment for me—by virtue of the fact that some of these goals and principles can sometimes be mutually exclusive, you really need to know from the start what your top-level goals are for the project (the purpose of the product, the user you’re targeting, the experience you hope to provide) so that when these conflicts arise you can more easily determine which goals take priority. There really is no substitute for strong research and a well thought-out plan.

Ultimately this reading was a great crash course in the terminology of interaction design and provided much food for thought and guidelines for a better practice. I feel more prepared to tackle this semester’s (and the rest of life’s) design problems already!

Predicting the future is never easy, but the analysis of past and current trends in computing and Winograd’s rough predictions for the future were insightful and interesting to read through. The trend of Computation to Communication was especially relevant given the surge of social media in the last few years, and I thought it was interesting how Winograd tied in more of a psychological angle by explaining that it’s simply human nature to be interested in other people, so why wouldn’t technology move in this direction? Humans are a very self-focused species—we always are more interested in things either pertaining to or resembling another human than something more abstract. Viewing it through this lens sheds light on why the most popular software today deals with communication, and why technology is in many ways fading into the background as simply a means to enable us to connect with each other in the ever-growing “interspace”. Furthermore the insight that technology is not the only thing driving the future innovations in the field, but rather that cultural shifts that we cannot possibly foresee will have an arguably greater impact, was a great one, and further reiterates that interaction design cannot exist in a vacuum; it is the synthesis of everything around us that contributes to the user experience.

I also thought that the parallel Winograd describes whereby Interaction Design is to Computer Science as Architecture is to Civil Engineering was a wonderfully illustrative one. I would extend that slightly further however, adding Interior Design and Visual Design into those sequences. In each of those combinations—Interior Design/Architecture/Civil Engineering and Visual Design/Interaction Design/Computer Science, the middle field makes possible a fluid connection between the two outer fields, without which the finished works could never fulfill their full potential. I have always wanted to position myself in a space where I can keep one foot in the visual world and one foot in the technical world, and it appears that Interaction Design may be a strong candidate for my list of ways to find that balance.