Thoughts on Thoughts on Interaction Design

Sorry, couldn't help myself with the title. I just finished Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko. For me, just finishing a professional book says something--most of them don't hold my interest enough to push me through to their ends. Of course, it could be that it was only 150 pages, too.

In any case, after reading the first two sections, I felt like just buying copies for my co-workers because it pretty much expounds the way I think and feel about interaction design at this point, which due to its relative newness to mainstream product development and other factors is often misunderstood. Even I must admit to coming to this understanding as a journey myself, so I sympathize with the confusion people face, especially given the shifting terminology among those who more or less fill the same gap in the (software) industry.

There was only one part of the book I really didn't care for--the guest essay by Justin Petro. Maybe it's because I can't personally relate to the negative experiences so much, having come to IxD through a different path, but that essay just smacked a little too much of narcissism, whinging, and perhaps even a bit of arrogance--the designer as some kind of superior being. That sort of thing just doesn't seem helpful, certainly not if you want other disciplines to take us seriously.

In terms of content, I only mildly disagree (FWIW!) with the contention that behavior is our medium/what we design/shape. I guess it's no coincidence that Robert Fabricant and Jon Kolko, both top folks at frog design, share this idea about what we do. If you consider the medium as the thing the designer directly shapes and expresses himself through, I don't see how you can say it is behavior. We design things--things that involve and influence behavior to be sure--but to say that we design behavior or that it is our medium is too strong of a claim.

Human beings are free, reasoning creatures whose behavior is of that same substance--of their own volition--and the best we can do is influence it. True, we can in a sense dictate the specific interactions to some degree that people have with our designed things, but even then, people are free to either do or not do what we imagined we are inducing or inviting them to do, and often (maybe always) what they actually do--as conditioned by their context and individual nature--will at least be at some variance with what we hoped or intended.

That's why design as rhetoric, which is discussed in the book, may be a better way to talk about what we do as it relates to behavior. Even so, I found "design as rhetoric" only a partially fulfilling idea. Acknowledging we are in a way trying to induce some kind of particular response or behavior, the rhetorical element is only a part of what we do in design--we also understand and analyze, synthesize, imagine, and create, among other things. If I had to choose one main activity, it would be synthesis as the primary (differentiating) activity of design.

It also seems to me that speaking of design as a shaper of behavior or rhetoric puts the emphasis on the wrong place for most practical industrial or interaction design work. I guess I align more with Christopher Alexander's approach in Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Timeless Way of Building--that what we design should fit, not so much change or shape, the way people already behave or want to behave, and it should only be rhetorical if put to ends that align with the good of those being designed for.

I thought Section Three, while it is always fun to philosophize (no, I really think that!), is a section I feel comfortable telling folks they can skim over, unless they're really into the theoretical aspects of design, because I think it is unfinished. To say that design is poetry or language and to delve into particular theories of language is interesting and inspiring in some ways, but it's easy to say these things without taking the effort to draw the necessary lines that would help the average designer to design better. I would have loved Uday to keep going and illustrate a design language, its various concrete parts (more than fleeting references to icons and buttons), and show how consciously developing such a language has (or at least can have) meaningful, practical impact.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the idea of language in design. I just have yet to see a good, full-fledged implementation of the theory, either based on patterns or otherwise. Most discussions of language in design seem to stop just before they get useful or only develop part of a language (usually just a vocabulary).

The last section was the one I most enjoyed, chiefly the essay by Ellen Beldner, partly because her content was just so crunchy but also because of her style and unexpected off the wall comments/footnotes. I laughed out loud a couple times reading it.

So overall, I think that Jon's done the profession a service by publishing this book to help people think more clearly about what interaction design is all about. Even if I disagree on some details, the overall message and explication is extremely valuable and is a great starting point for further refinement of the discipline of interaction design as well as just generally helping people to come to a better understanding of it. Whether you are an interaction designer or you have to work with them, this is a worthwhile read.