Five things Interaction Design probably isn't
March 24, 2009 | Posted by: Carl Alviani
Shoddy economic future be damned; the past couple of years have been a rollicking time for Interaction Design. A brief attempt at summarizing the poorly-understood field on Creative Seeds last year began with the words "Hot, hot, hot," and things don't seem to be slowing down much, even as the job market as a whole collapses all around. The IxDA conference in Vancouver last month, for example, was notable for its remarkable enthusiasm and relative lack of gloom and doom (though this could be a function of its being populated mostly by the still-employed). Rob Walker, who I finally had the pleasure of meeting (briefly) in person at South by Southwest Interactive last week, recounted on his blog at festival's end that:
...the last day it came up in one conversation that nobody seemed to be talking about the economy at all...People were unveiling business ideas, lining up for movie openings, crowding panel talks to here more about what's the next Twitter or how to be me more awesome, or whatever - and figuring where the next party was.Given that these are arguably the two biggest events of the year for Interaction Designers, and throwing in IxD's stellar performance in the most recent Design Salary Survey, perhaps we've got a...dare I say?...recession-proof discipline on our hands.
I will temper this suggestion with the observation that the average Interaction Designer seems to be working awfully hard, and if there was an over-arching lesson to be pulled from all those panels and party conversations in Austin, it was that succeeding in IxD is largely a matter of hard work, long hours and endless improvements. That said...so is every other creative discipline. What makes this one different?
That turns out to be an incredibly hard question to answer, especially since the actual skill-set that defines IxD is so ill-defined. Last year's CS post ended on an abstract, unsatisfying note:
Ask any ten Interaction Designers what they do all day and you'll get nine or ten different answers. The actual tool used to optimize an interaction can range from Visio charts to Flash animations, storyboards to text-only essays....It is a continually self-evaluating field, but one content to let the process of asking be sufficient. Similarly, it is a field unwilling to cling to any particular tool...One commenter was even more succinct in expressing his bewilderment:
This post sums up the absurd level of frustration I have felt during my entire learning process. I know I don't have the experience to "be" an Interaction Designer, but no one can point me to a "real" path to follow (unlike say web design where I get a solid understanding of HTML/CSS and build from there into specialty areas)Like most of my friends and colleagues in the creative professions, I have trouble explaining to my mom what exactly I do for a living, so it's not like confounded laymen are an indicator of intentional obscurity. But IxD seems to be in a different category entirely. Not only does it confuse outsiders, it confuses Interaction Designers too.
I went to Interaction09 in Vancouver with an intense personal mission to nail down a clear definition of Interaction Designer, and what abilities are needed in order to be one. Almost every time I asked (and I asked a lot of times), the answer was "I have no idea." Which is funny, because several hundred people with that title gathered together in rooms every day of the conference to agree that the work they were doing was necessary, and worthy of attention and responsibility (much as people do at any other professional conference).
Playing devil's advocate, this raises the Wizard of Oz question: are they really doing something new, unique, and especially useful, once you pull back the curtain? Or are Interaction Designers merely the beneficiaries of a fad, like so many mediocre Seattle bands that got snapped up by labels in the early 90s, by virtue of where they happened to live (I'm talking to you, Candlebox)? It's easy to read things like the IxDA website's definition of the field with a cynical eye, and conclude that intentional obfuscation is part of the profession's appeal:
Interaction design (IxD) is a professional discipline that illuminatesAh, they define complex dialogues. Got it. About time someone started doing that.
the relationship between people and the interactive products they use.
While interaction design has a firm foundation in the theory, practice,
and methodology of traditional design, its focus is on defining the
complex dialogues that occur between people and interactive devices of
many types -- from computers to mobile communications devices to
appliances.
I want to be clear about one thing first: nearly all the IxD professionals I've spoken with have been intelligent, thoughtful, well-educated, and dedicated to their work. But the field as a whole seems to have no interest in -- in fact, seems to be adamantly opposed to -- defining what skills they have in common in a meaningful way. Dan Saffer of Kicker Studios gave a well-received keynote during Interaction09 in which he proclaimed that nobody should be defining the field, because definitions interfere with getting the job done (the associated slideshow is here, if you're interested). He followed that 15 minutes later with an insistence that IxD needs Rockstar Designers of its own -- Philippe Starcks, David Carsons, Frank Gehrys -- to gain the field the respect it deserves. The problem with this, of course, is that we non-rockstars can envision Frank messing with his crumpled paper models and Philippe sketching in his book. What should we see when we imagine an IxD rockstar at work?
So let me play the fool. Here are some incorrect definitions, but at least they're specific:
1. Interaction Designers do touchscreen interfaces for mobile devices. Well, a lot of them do. Once you get away from the keynotes, which don't actually differ much from one design conference to the next, many of the smaller, more specific sessions dealt with the minutiae of the tiny touchscreen. "Tap is the new click" was a subject of hot debate in Vancouver.
2. Interaction Designers are web designers who prefer to draw diagrams on whiteboards first. Everyone in IxD insists that their specialty is medium agnostic: the specific skills vary, but the process can be applied to web, object, and system alike. Except that almost all of them work with a 2D digital platform filled with pixels. The primary separation between the average Interaction Designer and the average Web Designer seems to be the amount of time they're given to research, plan, and try out alternatives.
3. Interaction Design is a subset of...something. This is a surprisingly contentious one. Whether IxD is a subset of User Experience Design, Web Design, Information Architecture, some other kind of design, or constitutes its own ground-breaking field is the fodder for long, impassioned debates. Being a subset doesn't diminish its validity though: Graphic Design started as a subset of printmaking, ID grew out of manufacturing, and so on. You have to start somewhere.
4. Interaction Design won't have a well-defined skill-set until it has an educational establishment behind it. This has more potential, since one thing that distinguishes IxD from nearly every other creative field is that the majority of its practitioners transferred into it from somewhere else. This does plenty to explain the fuzziness of the IxD toolbox, and suggests that as more schools establish Interaction Design programs, and more purpose-educated Interaction Designers enter the workforce, we'll see a winnowing away of the chaff until the real stuff that separates IxD from other fields becomes apparent. David Malouf's presentation "Toward A Foundation in Interaction Design" was a step in the right direction, but even that invited some dissent. Few IxD programs are more than a couple years old at the moment, and many of them are loathe to ally themselves with each other, so this may take awhile. And I don't envy the task of the department head trying to plan out one of those curricula.
5. Interaction Design is a religion. For the moment, this may be the most correct definition. In the absence of common skills, we're instead seeing a field defined by a common set of intentions: the process of interacting with technology should make sense, it should encourage good behaviors (and what could indicate religion more clearly than a tendency to define "good" behavior?), everything should be researched and prototyped and tested. And yes, these are medium-agnostic intentions, applicable to many kinds of design problems.
Do they constitute a new branch of design though? I cannot say. Perhaps the faithful could enlighten us?
Edited by our resident creative employment guru, Carl Alviani, Editorial Director of Coroflot.
It seems the field of interaction design is in need of what web design needed years ago: the web standards movement.
Are there any "standards" of quality that could be extrapolated and evangelized for the sake of raising awareness within the practitioners of the field?
With regards to IxD being undefinable, I tend to be skeptical of such claims.
But if it truly can't be defined, then perhaps it is a way of thinking, or an approach more than a set of skills or tools that we use.
If IxD is undefinable, then quality is the culprit. Quality is undefinable, you know what it is, but as soon as you try and explain it, you lose the sharpness of it.
Nice post. Thanks! =)
Posted by: Jason Robb | March 24, 2009 09:08 AM