- What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?
Interaction design is the process of creating systems, products, or anything is used by a person. An interaction designer has to study the needs, thoughts, and actions of people in order to create an effective product or system that a user can actually interact with and hopefully achieve something by interacting with it. This can be digital and non digital but more often today, interaction design is can be more heavily influential in digital design use. The interaction design industry can often struggle with persuading others, whether it be the client or someone funding the project, about the importance of user testing and taking time to understand the user. Large amounts of time can be put into observation, brainstorming, and testing. In addition, a large issue of interaction design is the fact that every user can be completely different. So products need to be designed for multiple different users to be able to interact with it successfully. This can range anywhere from different physical needs to people understanding different cultural references.
- What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?
Interaction design had a large start with the growing world of web design and was often considered in graphic design. Interaction design has only grown since technology takes a larger effect on our daily lives. How a user interacts with something has to be heavily considered at every step of designing something, especially because more design is turning into something we use on our handheld devices or on a computer. So the way a user interacts with every button and screen has to be thought about. Interaction design has to draw knowledge from different studies like in the field of psychology to understand how people think. In addition, information design and different computer fields heavily influence interaction design. Interaction design has to take influence from other fields in order to best understand the people they’re designing for.