Interaction Design

"Interaction Design" refers to the shaping of interactive products and services with a specific focus on their use.

Broadly speaking, there are two main senses of the concept, coming out of different intellectual traditions but increasingly converging in practice and research.

Interaction design as a design discipline

One interpretation is to view interaction design as a design discipline, distinguished by its focus on the digital design materials: software, electronics and telecommunications.

As a design discipline, it is more closely affiliated with industrial design and architecture than with engineering and behavioral science. The "shaping of interactive products and services" is an instance of design work, which broadly shares the following characteristics across design disciplines.

• Design work is about exploring possible futures, starting from a situation at hand.
• It intends to change the situation for the better by developing and deploying some sort of product or service, i.e., the concrete outcome of the design process.
• It considers instrumental and technical as well as aesthetic and ethical qualities throughout the design process.
• Design work involves developing an understanding of the task – the "problem", or the goal of the design work – in parallel with an understanding of the space of possible solutions.
• Finally, it entails thinking by sketching, building models, and expressing potential ideas in other tangible forms.

This interpretation of interaction design tends to combine two main strands of intellectual traditions, one involving design disciplines such as industrial design, graphic design and architectural design gradually acknowledging the influence of digital technology and media on their own core materials and practices. The other main ancestor is the Scandinavian school of systems development with its long-standing ideological and methodological aims for user participation and co-determination.

Prominent examples of viewing interaction design as a design discipline within academia are found in conferences such as DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), DUX (Designing the User Experience), PDC (Participatory Design Conference) and lesser conference series such as DPPI (Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces). Some cornerstone books include the prescient collection Bringing Design to Software and, more recently, Designing Interaction and Sketching User Experiences. Influential proponents of this perspective in academia include people like Brenda Laurel, Terry Winograd, Bill Buxton and Pelle Ehn.

Interaction design as an extension of HCI

The other interpretation of interaction design is to see it as an extension of human-computer interaction (HCI), a field originating in experimental psychology and computer science and tracing its roots to the 1970s. The main concern in HCI was always to assert instrumental qualities such as usability and usefulness of digital products and services, predominantly in work-related or task-oriented use situations and typically with a focus on an individual user and his/her goals.

HCI was originally oriented mainly towards field studies (of, e.g., existing user populations, their cognitive traits and current practices) and evaluation (of, e.g., an existing product or a proposed product concept). However, it was found that the impact on the resulting products and ultimately on the benefits for the users would be greater if HCI practitioners and researchers would engage in the design rather than merely pointing out usability problems after the fact. Hence, the HCI palette of methods, tools and responsibilities was extended to encompass more creative and generative activities.

The key academic venues for interaction-design-oriented HCI include the CHI conference (Human Factors in Computing Systems) and many other regional or second-tier conferences, as well as a broad range of journals including the prestigious TOCHI (ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction). A typical book reflecting the reorientation of the HCI field towards interaction design is Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, and characteristic examples are found in the works of researchers like Ben Shneiderman, Donald Norman, Stuart Card and Jenny Preece.

The two perspectives converge

The use of digital products and services (i.e., the subject matter of HCI) in society transformed radically from the early 1990s and onwards with the proliferation of the Internet, mobile connectivity, digital consumer products and games towards a dominance of discretionary use for fun, pleasure and recreation over instrumentally motivated use for solving work-related tasks. Consequently, instrumental quality concepts such as usability and usefulness lost in relative importance to experiential concepts addressing the non-instrumental qualities of use (including aesthetic, ludic and social qualities). As mentioned above, the more mature design disciplines underlying the first interpretation of interaction design always addressed non-instrumental and instrumental qualities in equal measures.

The increasing amount of design activities and the increasing focus on what HCI calls user experience are the two main factors motivating the growing tendency for HCI to adopt interaction design as a more appropriate label for the field. They also broadly explain the apparent tendency for the two interpretations to converge, as witnessed in hiring policies and work practices in professional interaction design contexts as well as in the increasing amount of cross-disciplinary research where designers collaborate with scholars from a HCI background.

Looking back, the most significant differences between the two interpretations of interaction design used to be the degree of interest in aesthetic and ethical qualities, the nature of understanding the goal (growing throughout the process versus aiming at goal specification in upstream phases), and the importance ascribed to the work of making ideas explicit throughout the process. As the two interpretations converge, the differences tend to diminish accordingly.

Interaction design and digital materials

The recommended use of the term interaction design is limited to products and services which more or less rely on digital materials for their realization. This is due to the significance for a design discipline of knowing its respective design materials. It is impossible to design interaction per se, even though the term unfortunately implies otherwise, but what interaction designers do is to create conditions for interaction. It is possible to make some things more likely to happen, others less likely, and the way in which this is accomplished is by shaping the digital materials into tools, props and media for others to appropriate and use. The digital materials of software, electronics and telecommunications have specific properties that interaction designers need to understand well in order to increase the likelihood of achieving intended outcomes in use. For instance, designing a multiplayer online game is quite different from designing a (non-digital) board game. The digital-material property most significantly determining the difference in this case is the possibility for synchronous and quasi-anonymous many-to-many communication over a distance.

There is also a pragmatical argument for coupling interaction design with digital materials. Both of the main interpretations above have strong roots in fields concerned exclusively with the digital, which ought to carry more weight than any fine semantic points about what interaction "actually" means.

This is not to say that interaction design concerns itself only with purely digital products and services. For instance, it is rapidly becoming impossible to separate interaction design from industrial design in digital consumer products (even though some developers of consumer products still try). Moreover, several emerging fields in interaction design research, including tangible interaction, mixed-reality interfaces and pervasive computing, address physical form and materials as inevitably integrated with virtual form and digital materials. The point is merely that the digital materials have specific properties which greatly influence the use of products and services built from them, and the knowledge of those materials and properties form part of the core of knowledge defining the interaction design community.

Other ways of slicing the field

The choice of the two interpretations (design-discipline versus extension-of-HCI) is by no means the only possible way to structure a presentation of the interaction design field, even though it tends to explain the historical development of multidisciplinarity in the field rather well. Another approach which seems quite established in the community is to divide the field according to the main technologies involved in creating the use situation. For instance, academic subcommunities with their own conferences and journals have emerged in areas like mobile services, ubiquitous computing, web services, adaptive systems, and tangible interaction.

Other attempts to slice the field of interaction design include dividing by use genre (productivity, play, communication, entertainment, and so on) or by market structures and development-process organization (bespoke development, in-house development, product development, end-user development, etc.)

How to learn more

For further explorations, the HCIBIB project is a rich repository of academic HCI books, articles and other resources. The official Wikipedia entry on interaction design provides a useful introduction to interaction-design-as-HCI.

There is an annotated bibliography at webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo/idBookshelf, focusing on the design-discipline perspective on interaction design.

In relation to the brief discussion about different ways of slicing the field, here are some of the key resources in the different technology-defined subcommunities.

• Mobile services: The MobileHCI conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services.
• Ubiquitous computing: The Ubicomp conference and the journal on Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.
• Adaptive systems: The journal on User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.
• Tangible interaction: The TEI conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction.

Finally, the Interaction Design Association is a rather widespread and lively network of interaction design practitioners, built around an email list, where it is easy to get an idea of current issues and trends in the emerging industry of interaction design.

The following list includes references to the books and other resources mentioned in the text above.

• Buxton, Bill (2007): Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  

• Moggridge, Bill (2007): Designing Interactions. The MIT Press
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  

• Sharp, Helen, Rogers, Yvonne and Preece, Jennifer J. (2007): Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. John Wiley and Sons
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  

• Winograd, Terry, Bennett, John, Young, Laura De and Hartfield, Brad (eds.) (1996): Bringing Design to Software. Addison-Wesley Publishing
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  

• Proceedings from the DIS, DUX, PDC, DPPI and CHI conferences as well as articles from TOCHI are found in the ACM Digital Library.

What do YOU think?

Give us your opinion! Do you have any comments/additions
that you would like other visitors to see?

Keith Instone says: Jun 11th, 2008

#1

Thanks for the analysis from the 2 perspectives. I would be interested to hear where you would place Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction book within this context.

Frechin says: Jun 13th, 2008

#2

I am agree with you first topic. Interacion is just a way to produce a contemporary product; In france, We are tlaking od Design numérique (digital design). It is a more hollistic approach. Situation, interacion, representation focus on use, pratice and expeiene (vécu)

best

Jonas Löwgren says: Jun 13th, 2008

#3

Keith,

Thanks for your question. I suppose I would describe Saffer's book as a clear example of how the two historically quite distinct perspectives are now converging in all kinds of ways. Saffer writes out of the CMU/design-school tradition, yet covers many of the issues that HCI/usability folks are increasingly focusing attention on -- and he does it in a way that I think is accessible to HCI/usability folks as well as design-school folks.



Pity I didn't think of it when writing the text; thanks a lot for bringing it up!

Dan Saffer says: Jun 13th, 2008

#4

I think my book rests squarely in the top category, Interaction Design as a Design Discipline.

Sathyan V says: Aug 14th, 2008

#5

This article was very helpful to me knowing about the interaction design. It clearly tells what it is all about and the gives a deeper understanding about the confused phrase "Interaction Design"

Adam Williams says: Sep 12th, 2008

#6

I agree that interaction design is clearly a design disciple along the lines of architecture, visual design, communication design, etc. What interaction design lacks, and the other seem to have in abundance, is clear and thoughtful design criticism (something different from a cognitive walkthrough or a heuristics evaluation). I'm disappointed there is not mention of interaction design critique anywhere on this site.

Mattias Arvola says: Oct 16th, 2008

#7

I think also that we should distinguish 'interaction design' from 'interactive design'. Interaction design has the two roots/slants Jonas describes, but there is a third one with its roots in media. People entering the field from for example drama, film, television, literature, hypermedia and multimedia, approach the field using a media perspective and think in terms of for example narrative (Jonas working at K3 in Malmö would of course be very familiar with this). Designers with this perspective tend to (in my experience) see themselves as designers of interactive media, and I have often heard them favour the term interactive design (which an interaction designer from a HCI tradition probably wouldn't use).

Uxdesign.com says: Oct 25th, 2008

#8

This entry provides an interesting perspective. Good, if maybe non-essential, historical points. Though I am surprised that User Interface (UI) Design is not once mentioned here, as it is a core interaction design-related activity. And, as design is so context dependant, to say IxD "considers instrumental and technical as well as aesthetic and ethical qualities..." while not untrue, is insufficient. Professional interaction design, especially for software applications (who else really claims it?), incorporates an entire constellation of related contexts, including those business strategy, not to mention user-centered design methodologies, and many more.

Mattias Arvola says: Oct 29th, 2008

#9

All professional design (not only interaction design) incorporates an entire constellation of related contexts. Klaus Krippendorff coming from the area of product semantics wrote in 1989 an article called "On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Propositions that "Design is Making Sense (of Things)" (Design Issues, Vol. 5, nr 1, Spring 1989, pp. 9-39). In that article he describes how all professional design needs to manage four essential contexts: 1. The operational context (including product identity, qualities, orientation, location, affordances, motivations, states, dispositions and logic, and redundancies); 2. The sociolinguistic context (including user identities, signs, social differentiation and integration, content of communication and material support for social relationships); 3. Context of genesis (including all stakeholders involved in the production-consumption cycle, skills in creating patterns and models, skills in convincing others, addressing the network, comprehensibility, resource availability, costs & benefits, adaptability, and entropy and pollution); and finally 4. Ecological context (including competition, cultural complexes of technology, and autopoesis of technology). My point here is that managing entire constellations of contexts is common to all professional design, and not only interaction design. The problem with interaction design as practised in the software industry is that it, like the entire IT-industry, tends to forget or be ignorant of everything done, thought and said before. Interaction design as practised in the product industry and taught at design schools does at least have 100-year history of product design to fall back on, but here people are sometimes instead ignorant of how to approach the immateriality of computing and algorithms, and how to handle massive amounts of data.

Mattias Arvola says: Nov 3rd, 2008

#10

Due to feedback sent to me privately, I realise that my previous post may sound overly critical. It isn't intended to. My criticism is directed at the entire IT-industry where we tend to re-invent the wheel just because we work with new technology. My post is intended to highlight that the two intellectual traditions in interaction design have a lot to learn from each other. With a humble mindset, the crossfertilisation and convergence of the two traditions will create many interesting learning opportunities.

Sameer Chavan says: Feb 18th, 2010

#11

Well, I like what Mattias has pointed above. I come from hardcore mechanical engineering background(practiced and build machines) but I am now practicing HCI, Usability or Interaction design (whatever you say) for over a decade. The whole thing about IT is that its less then a 100yrs old. Mechanical or Civil is more then 10,000 years old. So everyone coming to this so-called HCI field has interesting perspectives on what it should be. I think HCI is the most confused discipline with derived sub disciplines (information design, interface design, UI design, experience design, ...). Or may be its very undefined discipline. It wont be surprising if we see another dozen new derived disciplines or job titles.

I also liked how Jonas has tried to explained the Interaction Design. The question is if an Industrial Designer(like myself) designs control panel of washing machine or a electrical switchboard, is that called "Interaction Design". Does Interaction design apply to hardware products ?



Actually i landed on this site while searching interaction design as my korean friend asked me if User Experience is above HCI or below it, as a discipline hierarchy. Wow! i have to think again.

Once i had tried to put all funny design designations in one table. Here they are http://www.sameerchavan.com/?p=655



I like this discussion.

Dave Malouf says: Mar 3rd, 2010

#12

For me the only disagreement I have is that Interaction Design is connected to the digital. It is historically sprung from the digital, but it is not limited to that area.



The reason that technology is irrelevant is that technology is constantly moving. Today the digital is tomorrow's vacuum tubes. But that differentiation is trite. What is more important to express is that it is only b/c of technology that we now have new understanding about how things & systems intervene on our behalf and against us in ways that increase complexity and change our own behaviors.



The framing of IxD above is still at a stage of yore, but just like few industrial designers would call their discipline 3D design for mass production, nor should we create definitions of ourselves that mire us in a history that is ever increasingly dynamic. We can't keep coming up with new disciplines every 20 years. it is just way too confusing. ;)

 

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