IxD - Complete Beginner’s Guide to Interaction Design Web design has followed a long and winding road from it’s rather modest beginnings. Initially, the term “web designer,” described something much more akin to that of a graphic designer: a designer who concerns themselves with the presentation of text and pictures. Today, however, the majority of websites and applications online are interactive. In turn, modern web designers are called upon to make a number of considerations drastically different than those made by traditional graphic designers. To bridge this gap, we call upon the discipline of interaction design. This article serves as a good jumping off point for people interested in learning more about Interaction Design. What is Interaction Design? Interaction design got its start only a few decades ago when the first interactive systems made their debut. The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) explains: Interaction designers strive to create useful and usable products and services. IxDA What concepts drive IxD? Goal-driven design
Explorable Explanations Bret Victor / March 10, 2011 What does it mean to be an active reader? An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's argument as a springboard for critical thought and deep understanding. Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. This essay presents examples of few initial ideas: A reactive document allows the reader to play with the author's assumptions and analyses, and see the consquences. An explorable example makes the abstract concrete, and allows the reader to develop an intuition for how a system works. 1. Ten Brighter Ideas was my early prototype of a reactive document. drag The way it is now: Analysis:
IxD - Interaction 11 Recap By David Sherwin - February 21, 2011 In early February, a number of frogs attended this year's Interaction 11 conference, sponsored by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Our time in Boulder began with a fresh blanket of snow and ended with all-you-could-drink absinthe at the closing night party. In my contribution for the conference, I taught a three-hour workshop called "Better Ideas Faster: Effective Brainstorming for Interaction," which focused on the unique tools and techniques that interaction designers bring to bear in translating research findings into actionable design concepts that cohere into large-scale systems. This year's conference has been hard for me to summarize—not because of the absinthe, mind you—and in combing through my notes and reflecting on the experience, more questions have emerged than coherent themes. Here are some of the reasons why I think this instability has come about. Talent from lateral disciplines are providing us with much-needed perspective.
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction In real life, you would never use a ladder that only let you go up. Likewise, when creating abstractions, stepping down is as important as stepping up. Here, we take the abstraction from the previous section, and overlay a concrete representation on top of it. That is, we draw the trajectory that represents all time, but we also draw the car at some particular time. How do we select which particular time to show? This is a general and powerful technique. Try cranking up the turning rate to 8° or so, and then inspecting the car's behavior as it makes its first two turns. In this case, it's fairly easy to look at the trajectory and imagine the car moving along.
IxD - The Cooper Journal: So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer We get a lot of email from students and usability professionals asking how one goes about becoming an interaction designer, and what background one needs to get into the field. What are good interaction design programs? What real-world skills and experience are required? What, exactly, do interaction designers do on a day-to-day basis? Pursuing academic training The first thing to keep in mind is that interaction design is a new discipline that is still being defined in the academic setting. There isn’t agreement (though this is happily beginning to change) in the academic community about what the core elements of an interaction design curriculum might be, or how to approach the teaching of that curriculum. How is interaction design different? It’s easy to understand the confusion, since interaction design as a discipline borrows theory and technique from traditional design, psychology, and technical disciplines. Interaction Design is a design discipline dedicated to: Other paths
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing. As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. This matters, because visions matter. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what a tool is in the first place. I like this definition: A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. That's right! And that's great!
IxD - Core77 - Interaction Design and ID: You're alreay doing it...don't you want to knowwhat it's all about? Interaction Design and ID: You're already doing it...don't you want to know what it's all about? By David Malouf Today, more and more industrial designers are being asked to design products and systems that incorporate interactive components. Further, if we look at the classical foundational elements of industrial design, there is almost no reference to anything dealing with behavior—color, texture, shape, volume, space, and line remain the primary "building blocks" of a formal industrial design education. If product designers are facing a deluge of interaction design challenges (and they are), why is such poor attention being paid to bringing interaction design into the fold of the industrial design community? Some definition First, what is interaction design? Interaction Design is a design discipline dedicated to: • Defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (i.e., products), and therefore concerned with: Interactive products can be complex to design for. 2. 3. 4.
Magazine - Get Smarter Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. Image: Anastasia Vasilakis Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. How did we cope? Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. Scientists refer to the 12,000 years or so since the last ice age as the Holocene epoch. In any case, there’s no going back.