A common reference for defining Interaction Design are Bill Verplank’s drawings, one of the creators of the noun.
Bill defines Interaction Design as a question threefolded:
- How do you do? What sort of ways do you affect the world: poke it, manipulate it, sit on it?
- How do you feel? What do you sense of the world and what are the sensory qualities that shape media?
- How do you know? What are the ways that you learn and plan (or perhapse, how we want you to think)?
Good enough for Interaction Design as it is currently practiced mainstream, a individualistic approach for humanizing technology. I don’t want to throw away the merit from this definiton, but I have to say that it doesn’t account for what Interaction Design could be in a broader sense.
At the past, it helped a lot young interaction designers (specially from Ivrea) to develop the sensorium qualities of technologies, but if we want to develop Interaction Design as a strategic field in our society, we have to go further.
First, let’s come back to the definition of the word “interaction”.
Physics says that interaction is an encounter of two elements that transform each other mutually. Verplank’s definition shows that the human feels the world, reflect upon it from what they know and act on the world accordingly. After the interaction, both human and world are not the same.
Ok, but, what have changed? At the human side, the knowledge from the world have changed. This knowledge is social. People think about what they feel in a social fashion, allways relating to it’s cultural values. I know what is knowable from my culture.
After learning something, people want to share with others their feelings and opinions. Then comes expression. What people say about something is as important as different to what they know about it. Expression is an action oriented towards the knowledge and the world simultaneously. It´s a link between them. It makes impact on both.
At the world side, things are happening all the time. Thoughs have actionable consequences. The world can become a better place or a poisoned dump, depending on human actions. Time is a important factor to consider when measuring effects, because long time effects can be dramatically opposite from short time ones, as in the global warming caused, in part, from refridgerator gases. Effects must be taken at both macro and micro contexts.
Interactions are not isolated, nor unique. People are interacting with the world at the same time, using the same tools and getting similar effects. It’s a social process. This potentialize knowledge gathering and sharing, expression replication and network effects. This can be considered a great interaction, a complex interaction between multiple elements.
According to the symbolic interactionism, this complexity arises from the contradiction between human predispositions and motivations. Often, it’s not possible to do what we want to, but there are allways many other possibilities. That’s why there are not easy dillemas.
This complexity level can seams unattainable for day-by-day Interaction Design projects, but if we want to get more relevant projects, we have to strive for it. Only after accepting this interaction complexity that Interaction Design can help society cope with the greatest dillemas of our time: sustainability, democracy and health.