Feature: Is Interaction Design Here to Stay?

This is an extract from Bill Moggridge's new book "DESIGNING INTERACTIONS", published by MIT Press in December 2006, in which he considers the future of the discipline.

"The decades ahead will be a period of comprehending biotech, mastering nature, and realizing extraterrestrial travel, with DNA computers, microrobots, and nanotechnologies the main characters on the technological stage. Computers as we know them today will (a) be boring, and (b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, selfcleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs that let the Federal Express man in and Fido out, but not 10 other dogs back in. Computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: We’ll live in them, wear them, even eat them. . . . Yes, we are now in a digital age, to whatever degree our culture, infrastructure, and economy (in that order) allow us." Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, 1998

We seem to be well on the way toward fulfilling these predictions that Nicholas Negroponte describes with such colorful images. Even if you doubt that we are already in a digital age, it is clear that we are marching relentlessly toward a condition where everything that can be digital will be digital. What does this mean for interaction design?

In June of 2002 I was in London at the time of the display of work of the graduating master’s students at the Royal College of Art, and I was looking at the projects from the interaction design department. I was impressed by the fact that most of them were both digital and physical; the students were designing smart objects rather than computer-based software. I was moving from the work of one student to the next, looking in some detail at the individual designs. Suddenly I looked up at the whole room, and discovered to my surprise that I had drifted into the area occupied by the projects from the industrial design department, never noticing a difference in the nature of the work. Just as the interaction designers were designing smart objects, the industrial designers were designing objects that were smart, finding it natural to include electronically enabled behaviors. It made me wonder if this was evidence of the beginning of the end of interaction design as a separate discipline.

Practitioners in the technical design disciplines adopt new technologies earlier than their counterparts in the human disciplines. This would lead one to expect that a similar migration might have already happened in engineering.

Computer science emerged first and gave rise to new disciplines for the design of hardware and software. Eventually every engineer expected to use electronics and software in the natural course of development, so engineering education included learning about circuits and programming languages.However, this did not mean that the new disciplines of hardware and software design merged back into the traditional engineering design disciplines, but rather that all aspects of engineering design make use of technology, and all engineering designers can operate to some extent in the digital realm. It seems likely that a parallel to this will exist in the human disciplines, with all designers thinking it natural to include digital solutions as aspects of their designs, accepting the constraints and opportunities offered by new technologies. At the same time there will continue to be interaction designers who have a more in-depth knowledge and expertise about designing interactions and remain the experts in the field. I think interaction design is here to stay.

Associated Link: DESIGNING INTERACTIONS

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