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A Definition of (interaction) Design

The following is something I orginally wrote on my own in response to some readings I was doing, and later turned into a short paper for my seminar course. While I’m sure that many people will disagree with it (I’m still on the fence myself), you may find it thought provoking.

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As a graduate student working towards a Master’s of Interaction Design I am often asked to explain what interaction design is. I have struggled greatly to find a simple, appropriate answer to this simple, appropriate question. More specifically, I have tried to design an answer that would make sense to non-designers. My classmates and I spent the majority of my first semester looking at how one might define ‘interaction’ – an incredibly deep and broad concept. With time, however, I have come to realize that my inability to define interaction design does not stem from ambiguity regarding interaction, but an ambiguity surrounding “Design”. I believe, however, that I have now formulated a useful definition of Design:

Design is finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products.

It may seem that this particular definition is too general to be meaningful, and that it will not satisfy my criteria that a definition of (interaction) design be simple and appropriate to non-designers. A little clarification of terms should help immensely, however.

Design is “finding problems” because designers are not limited to defining recognized problems. We do not work solely on problems that are already recognized as such, but oftentimes must locate product failures that are obscured. Furthermore, we do not only address problems for which we are asked and/or paid to design solutions for – we design solutions for others and ourselves because it is our passion and our way of life.

Design is “defining problems” because designers take an unsatisfied need or want (the problem) and then determine what sub-systems and related issues play a role in keeping that need or want unsatisfied. This process can be as simple as realizing that nobody has previously addressed the problem at all (hence the absence of a solution), and as involved as doing months of research in order to see exactly why a given software application is not being used as efficiently as the developer had hoped.

Design is, of course, solving problems. This is the heart of our practice. We craft solutions in the form of products.

Design is human. We are fundamentally concerned with human activity (this is, in fact, the closest design comes to having a ‘domain’). People do not call on designers to solve math problems, or issues of engineering because there are mathematicians and engineers who are better at such things. This is not to say that designers are not good with numbers – many are – rather that design specializes in solving problems with a human component. One of the designer’s great skills is the ability to work with distinctly human problems, which are (as a direct result of humans’ own incredible complexity) so tortuous that they cannot be systematically analyzed.

Designers do their work pragmatically. Pragmatic consideration necessitates that designers not limit themselves to a particular domain when working on a problem. Practitioners in other fields often ignore factors that are not within their predetermined realm of study. When I studied International Political Economy, the scholars I read prided themselves on realizing that political science and economics could not be usefully separated when analyzing the history of nations, all the while ignoring the important cultural and sociological forces that also affect states.(1) Designers cannot afford to do this because we look for real-world solutions and recognize that these are almost always trans-disciplinary. Additionally, we find solutions that address the most important parts (though never all of the parts) of a problem. Because design problems are wicked (i.e., complex)(2), there will always be issues that are left unresolved, but we make pragmatic decisions about which parts of a given problem are most important to the final solution.

Finally, Design offers its solutions in the form of “products.” It is important to note that product does not only refer to physical artifacts. Services are products, organizations are products, and even methods thinking can be products. Basically, a product is any human invention with a purpose (tangible or not).

Thus we have a formal definition of design. But don’t many people do this? Lots of folk find, define, and solve human problems pragmatically. Some people who do not identify as designers are highly skilled at doing just that–witness the successful entrepreneur who invents, manufactures, and sells a successful product without the help of any “designers.” The answer is yes, many people practice design on some level, and some are even very good at it. This is not to devalue the profession of design, however. I do believe that ‘designers’ are special and unique in their own right, and so we require a better definition of designer than “one who practices design.”

Designers are ‘team-savants.’ That is, designers are people highly skilled (and often trained) in working in concert to harness their collective abilities to practice design in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Designers work together to craft products representing solutions that are unequivocally better than any we would have found working alone. We have developed a smorgasbord of tools, methods, and values that we regularly employ, but these are not what make us designers.(3) It is the fact that we employ these methods together and recognize the ultimate utility of doing so that defines us as designers. Our collective thinking acts as a savant that cannot exist in any of us singly, but which we are skilled at incarnating as a group – and we use this to create products. This is what makes a designer.

The problem with this definition of a designer is that it excludes such well-recognized professionals as Paul Rand, who is known to have been downright reclusive while working.(4) To this point I argue that the field of design is highly dynamic and is not the same practice that it was fifty years ago. As a result, my definition is placed in time and appropriate to the field in its current state, but not necessarily to the practice as it was in the past (or will be in the future). My definition may relegate some professionals who identify as designers to the ranks of ‘graphic artist’ and ‘web developer,’ but I believe this is a necessary sacrifice to arriving at a useful denotation.

Given this definition of design and designer, what then is interaction design? It is my belief that there is no such thing. The definition provided encompasses the many definitions of interaction design, even if it lacks their specificity. Such specificity, however, often takes the form of a list of methods along the lines of “interaction designers utilize personas, contextual inquiry and this and that to design interactive something-or-anothers.” As mentioned earlier, interaction is a concept-word that cannot be given a simple definition upon which everyone will agree. If we cannot agree on the definition, then using the term will only confuse those with whom we work. Moreover, a list of design methods is opaque to anyone not trained in design, and so is functionally inappropriate. I believe that the term has come into favor because the word ‘design’ too often conjures images of furniture and magazine covers. Designers who do not focus their work on graphics or static objects thus use the term because, to the average person, it connotes technology (which is preferable to being thought of as ‘someone who makes stuff look pretty’). While I understand and empathize with this stance, I believe that we do ourselves a disservice in adopting it. If we can more clearly communicate what Design is, and what we as designers do, then we will change the connotations that the word holds and be better able to express the essence of our profession.

Footnotes:
(1) For an example of such thinking see the introduction to International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth, Fourth Edition, ed. Jeffry A. Frieden and David A. Lake, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2000), 1-9.
(2) For a discussion of wicked problems see Richard Buchanan’s Wicked Problems in Design Thinking in The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 6-11.
(3) For convincing arguments to the contrary, see Forlizzi and Reimann Interaction Designers: What we are, what we do, & what we need to know (slide presentation) and Clement Mok Time for Change available at: http://www.clementmok.com/musings/detail.asp?ItemID=12
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rand

February 17th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | 1 Comment »  

Long Time No Blog

Well, it’s certainly been a long time since I’ve written anything here. The semester ended, winter break is now more than half-way over, and I’m finally going to put up some more stuff. Wish I could say I was taking a NOSO, but the truth is I just haven’t been blogging.

Break has been great - got to see family in Chicago and St. Paul, have been using my free time to work extra hours at my job with the CMU Office of Campus Design (I’m trying to save up enough to purchase the Ableton Live 7 Suite), and have finally gotten to work on a little music.

The fall semester ended on a less than perfect note, with one of my group projects more or less falling apart, but such is life (and life with people). I’ve experienced similar things in the working world as well as the complete opposite (both working and in school). On a brighter note, my final paper for Richard Buchanan went over very well - “One of the best papers in Design theory that I have seen” Dick said, and nothing could have made me happier. Now I just need to work at translating my thinking into more effective and powerful designs (for anyone who is interested, you’re welcome to check out my paper Systems of Thought and Relevance in Design). My group in Shelly Evanson’s Basic Interaction course managed to pull everything off beautifully - we were in fact the only group to show up to the final crit with a fully functioning prototype. If you’re interested, you can see the video sketch we put together and the online prototype at one of my group-mate’s website (this group mate - Lee Byron - is an absolute wunderkid, poke around the rest of his blog to see other great stuff he’s worked on/done).

And for music - please take a listen to these two new tracks and let me know what you think. Both are things I tinkered with over the course of the semester in my (relatively scarce) free time.

Silicone Smooth

Jazz Trap

January 4th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking, Music and Movies, Seminar I | No Comments »  

Meaning and its Disappearance

We’ve been looking a lot recently at methods of design, and how designers come to invent. Dick Buchanan talked to us yesterday about ‘topics’ (in the Aristotelian sense), and how (good) designers use topics, or placements, to escape the shackles of meaning. As an example, if I say ‘book,’ you will probably form a rather well-defined picture in your head. Now what if I were to say ‘physical artifact used to transfer information?’ In this second case, you might form a picture in your head, but it would certainly be more ambiguous. As a designer, the second phrase is where I might arrive through the use of placements if I were attempting to redesign the book. In other words, if I can find a way to strip away the meaning that I associate with a thing, then I will be able to see it in new ways, which is the heart of invention.

A similar thought that occurred to me is this: Which came first, black or white? Well, black of course, because prior to the big bang there was nothing. But if there was nothing, then there could be no color, so white came first, as the big bang was a blazing outpouring of light. But you can’t have light without darkness, and darkness is black, so black came first.

Obviously this train of thought could continue, going back and forth, forever. It doesn’t matter however, because to ask which of two colors came first has no meaning to us. Color as a concept does not, in our minds, exist within the otherwise perceived linearity of time, and so the question is meaningless.

But what if I ask which came first, televisions or paper? Well paper of course, it is one of the oldest technologies of mankind, and televisions are an invention of the twentieth century.

Why is the second question more meaningful? Because we perceive paper and televisions to have a place in linear time (as opposed to colors, which we do not perceive in this way). And so it is that we put meaning into things ourselves, though one meaning is no more ‘natural’ to a particular thing than another. Why should paper have a place in linear time and not color? When this meaning is removed, we are left with topics, also known as placements. Topics can take many forms, but I imagine them to be broad ideas without a particular meaning necessarily associated to them. They are ways of looking at things. The use of topics allows designers to gain new insights. For instance, if I were to redesign the television, I might start by asking what does it do? In this case ‘what does it do’ is a topic. Within that topic, there are many meanings I could identify: I could say that it is a device for transmitting information, or an artifact that displays dynamic imagery, or even a piece of furniture used to give the average living room some point of focus. All of these are valid meanings to pick from the topic of ‘what does it do’ in regards to a television.

The real danger, as Dick points out, is that if you get too good at doing this (stripping away the meaning of things), then you’re crazy because meaning is how we deal with reality.

And now that I’ve made a mess of trying to explain all of that, here are the far more eloquent words of Kenneth Burke, from his introduction to “The Grammar of Motives.”

“Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged.  They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed.  Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may again be thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction.  So that A may become non-A.  But not merely by a leap from one state to the other.  Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead.”

November 13th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, Seminar I | 2 Comments »  

Long time, no blog

So, I’ve obviously been pretty lazy about updating the old blog here. The truth is that I’ve been so ridiculously busy that I simply haven’t had time (I prioritize sleep over blogging, and I barely sleep so…). Anyway, I’ve completed several projects that I was pretty happy with, and would put them up here, but the deliverables were videos, and I’m still struggling with getting Flash videos to embed properly in this WordPress blog, so those will have to wait. What I do have are a number of thoughts about design that I’ve been jotting in a notebook and will transcribe here. Most of this thinking comes as a result of Richard Buchanan’s Seminar course, which I have started to enjoy – I think I’m getting it all now, and I’m really getting a kick out of the deep intellectual side of design (it didn’t hurt that I got high marks on my paper either).

To paraphrase Dick: Design problems are indeterminate, hence wicked.

I was thinking about this, and came up with the following to answer why design problems are indeterminate (let me make clear that this is not precisely what Dick says).

Because design problems are anything to which design thinking is applied. Design thinking, is subjectless, but revolves around finding form in infinite complexity. Why infinite complexity? Because anything artificial and the interactions within which it is situated are inextricably linked to human thinking, which is infinitely complex by nature (hence why psychology will never be a hard science as well). Thus, design problems are wicked. - If anyone else can follow that chain of reasoning I congratulate you. I fear that it’s probably too deeply informed by the seminar readings to make much sense to anyone outside of my classmates.

And to follow the last thought:
Human thinking is infinitely complex because any thought is influenced by all thought that came before it. Even if all thought that a human had were to be cataloged, each thought is continually influenced and affected by all other thought (whether before or after in time), causing an infinite loop. Furthermore, since thought can be affected by other thoughts (whether before or after in linear time), thought can be said to exist outside of linear time, and thus within dimensional time, which is, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

And my last thought for the day:

Design and economics are essentially similar. Design takes the extant infinite complexity of human interaction and uses it to plan the way forward (which is based in, and affects the future). Economics take the extant infinite complexity of human interaction and uses it to predict the future (based on a given plan of the way forward). And hey, whadoyaknow, there’re another pair of infinite loops in there if you look closely. I’m beginning to think that infinite loops may be the heart of why design is potentially so useful - Design can handle infinite loops because it is (where useful) a holistic approach - no science is or can be.

November 12th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking, Seminar I | 2 Comments »  

Reading like a Grad

I remember how on the first day of our seminar with Dick Buchanan, Dick told us that he hated teaching grad students because they think they know something and they really don’t.  He also told us that he was going to teach us a new way to read.  That as undergrads we learned to talk about our reactions to texts, but that this would no longer cut it.  At the time I considered what Dick said something of an affront.  Don’t get me wrong, Dick is a brilliant man (a philosopher and rhetorician  by trade, rather than a designer), but I just thought he was a bit of an intellectual bully.  I continued to feel this way for some time.  (only in class though - I also work as a TA for Dick, and he’s quite nice outside of class).

We had a class last week where I found myself getting so frustrated that I almost got up and walked out.  We were discussing a selection from “Time and Free Will” by Henri Bergson, and it simply didn’t make sense.  Bergson’s writing is so out there that I simply couldn’t wrap my head around any part of it, and having Dick sit there and tell us all that we were wrong (again) in our interpretations was pushing me over the edge.

It was the next day that things started to come together.  All of the second years said that this would happen, and they were right.  I realized that Dick has been correct from the beginning.  While discussing our reactions was fine at age 20, I am now old enough and experienced enough to see the value in truly understanding a text as the author meant it to be understood.  That is, there is great value in empathizing with an author and understanding their view of the world, even if it is not a view that I plan to make my own in the long run.  There have been a lot of people in history who were much smarter than me, and they wrote some great stuff.  If I am to learn the most, I must understand what they wanted to communicate.  Only then can I allow myself the luxury of a reaction.  This is also why Dick said we don’ know anything - because we haven’t previously understood the world views of history’s most important thinkers, and yet we have over-firm beliefs that are necessarily informed by these same thinkers.  We must understand the why of our own concept of existence before we can begin to understand interaction.

For the record though, I still don’t particularly enjoy philosophy.  But I am learning after all.

October 8th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »  

Explosion

The following is just plain funny.  It came inserted with a pair of headphones:

But lets look at it from a design perspective, shall we?  Clearly we don’t want our headphones exploding and so will do everything possible to avoid it.  We know from the diagram that the we should use a AAA battery - but is that a type?  Is the brand of battery a type?  The headphones came with a Phillips brand battery, do I need to find another one of those?  Will extended life batteries work, or will a Duracel Ultra result in my head exploding?  It seems to me that these are legitimate concerns.  If there’s any risk whatsoever of my headphones exploding, I think I would really appreciate more specific instructions rather than a vague warning that by using these headphones I’m putting my life in danger…

On the other hand, I’d really like to see a pair of headphones explode. 

October 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, Humor | No Comments »  

Yard Sculpture

Can you tell it’s my day off from the number of posts I’m putting up? Gotta play catch-up sometime. Anyway the photo below is over one of my neighbors’ front yard. I really like these (this?) sculpture, and think that there is something about this aesthetic that will be coming into vogue in the future (though these pieces probably date to the early 90’s). I would be interested to hear other people’s thought’s about them. I appreciate the beautiful geometry in the context of ragged grass and the old house behind. I also like how the two pieces appear symmetrical at a glance, but are not at all on closer inspection. I think that people are coming to appreciate metal as a natural material again - it gives a sense of strength, permanence, and strict intention that other materials, like plastic, do not. By ’strict intention’ I mean that it feels as if thought went into its design. Plastics are so cheap to produce that it is hard to make them feel this same way. The downside to all this is that metals are mined, and mining is a huge polluter, so I don’t think they can stay popular for long among the growing green trends. Still, I think metal will have a resurgence as a stylish material for things otherwise constructed in plastic.

September 28th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CoolHunting, Design Thinking, Photography | No Comments »  

Poster Critique

My Self Portrait poster was critiqued in class this week. The crit went badly – the opinion of most of my classmates came down to “it’s confusing.” My poster was also talked about last - meaning no one picked it to talk about, but rather the last person to talk got stuck with it. The interesting thing is, however, that everyone I’ve talked to who was not in the class really liked it. I think that maybe the problem was that all of my classmates saw each others’ posters in development and knew the concept behind each one prior to the critique (mine being the exception, as I threw out my original idea and redesigned the poster in the last week before the critique - hence most of my classmates were seeing my concept for the first time at the critique).

This raises an interesting question about design and users. Was the poster a success because many people outside the class found it engaging and informative, or a failure because my classmates (who may not have put as much effort into understanding it as a result of circumstances), found it to be neither. Both groups are users in this context, so I’m not sure of the answer. I guess I would say that it was a moderate success - it would have been better if were more accessible to all users, but was not a failure as many users found it interesting.

On a side note, I found that it is just as easy to become a slave to Adobe Illustrator as a technology as it is to become a slave to Actionscript. I think I have done a lesser design job on some prior projects because I spent too much time making the code work – in this case I could not redraw my poster for greater clarity in the time I had due to the way it was constructed in Illustrator. I need to do more sketching next time.

September 28th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Process, Design Thinking | No Comments »  

Seminar

Sitting in Dick Buchanan’s seminar this morning, I was again feeling a bit confused. Dick is an incredibly cerebral man, and a philosopher rather than a designer by trade. I believe that the seminar exists to teach us a new way of thinking, and I look forward to this. For homework we read a short article on communication theory published in 1949 that related to communication to thermodynamics (it was a big load to wrap my head around). I started jotting down special notes in the margin - I’m not sure if they’re about Dick or thought in general, but the felt like a bit of epiphany:

Language is fluid.
Meaning has no stasis.

Basically, any word can be used to mean anything, depending on context and the speaker’s intent, and meaning constantly changes (by meaning I think that I mean ideas - of any form). I’ve decided that to learn from Dick, I simply need to open my right-brain wide and absorb the gestalt of information and ideas that are presented in the class. I think they will begin to fit together over time. Until then, I may remain confused. But I am enjoying trying to understand everything.

September 5th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Thinking | No Comments »