What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?
Interaction design is made up of the “creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service or system.” It is designing products, services, and systems to fit with the behaviour of the every day person. This is done through research, analysis, surveying, interviewing and observing. All of this is put together to ensure the best quality item is produced for the end user. Some of the industry’s challenges are figuring out a way to “understand the problem space.” This is because interaction designers are rarely given a blank slate to work off of but instead have to redesign existing products or services to find ways to make it more consumer friendly. It is this designing for the consumer that produces the greatest challenge and is something interaction designers are faced with every day.
What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?
Interaction design is a “creative process focused on a people.” It is designing for behaviour and creating a design “that assists the viewer in not only experiencing a particular emotion but also in truly understanding the content.” Interaction design is evolving even though it is still recognized as a new field. This is because people have been designing interactions for centuries! Technology involving computing and communication has increased in speed, function, and capability and decreased in size and cost. This means that more consumer products can be found to contain some form of digitization. With this digitization comes the increased complexity of the user experience, and therefore Interaction designers are tasked with easing the suffering of the end users. Interaction designs draws knowledge from the field of cognitive psychology with regard to “cognition, memory, and perception.” It also draws from art as it “encompasses aesthetics and emotion.”