What is Interaction Design? Dan Saffer

This one’s another offline-readable PowerPoint presentation. I only took a few notes on my slides, which I’ll share below. The quick summary: if you’re not sure about what Interaction Design is, or even are only kinda sure, read through the deck.

• (Slide 10) Putting napkins on top of your drink so it’s "saved" is a behavior. As such, it can be designed for.
• (Slide 11) It’s about people connecting to other people through the products we use. We connect through products like: email, stereos, personal shoppers, and food servers at restaurants.
• (Slide 13) Interaction is: the message itself, the shape of the message, the deep connections between people.
• (Slide 20) Design is a slippery term people are uncomfortable with.
• (Slide 21) Interaction Designers (IDs) focus on the user (their motivation, results…). They focus on how people are able to do tasks and goals they want to do, and optimize for that.
• (Slide 22) IDs create alternatives.
• (Slide 23) Design doesn’t always product the solution, but produces a solution.
• (Slide 26) Emotional resonance is an important piece of interaction: lifeless products just aren’t pleasant to use.
• (Slide 28) UX Design - Encompasses everything that makes up an experience. Industrial design - creation of forms. HCI - quantitative perspective. Communication design == graphic design. IA/CD/UI Engineering/ID - how interface will work.
• (Slide 29) (right-hand image) What happens when I press the screen? How does this product get delivered to me?

  Interface design is the physical expression of interaction design. (Or, ideas created by interaction designers are expressed in - and shape - the design of the interface).

• (Slide 30) How this product works is governed by interaction design; it’s the layer that sits above the product.
• (Slide 36) These products were dumb. They had no idea they were being operated on.
• (Slide 38) Old computer punchcards === difficult and complicated.
• (Slide 39) Industrial designers first began designing for people, not designing things that would exist, oh yeah, and people would use those things.
• (Slide 41) This is the text of the first email ever sent.
• (Slide 42) Xerox PARC creates the first interface we’re used to.
• (Slide 43) Thus begins the shift from hardware to software. This begs the question, "Who is the computer really for?" It’s no longer just for the engineers.
• (Slide 45) Software finally takes over. It’s more important than the hardware. (In fact, now we buy new hardware to support better software because it’s the software we want. Programmers don’t dumb down software; we buy smarter machines).
• (Slide 48) The web becomes a platform for application development. It pushes the boundaries of what the web was supposed to be like. (Text. Link. Text. Link. Repeat).
• (Slide 49) The shrinking of hardware leads to mobile computing.
• (Slides 50 and 51) A robot and an RFID tag respectively.
• (Slide 52) How do people interact with an "Internet of things?" We answer this question through interaction design.

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