When I first picked up Matthew Frederick’s book: “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” I was struck by the num ber of prin ci ples of archi tec ture that can be directly applied to inter ac tion design, but also dis il lu sioned by the fact that Interaction Designers gen er ally do not have a sim i lar body of knowl edge to draw on. Sure we have lots of “process”, but rel a tively lit tle “wis dom” of the sort found in this book.
The field of Interaction Design isn’t very old — If we’re talk ing purely soft ware interface design, then let’s say about 25 years old. No sur prise, then, that we bor row heavily (and unashamedly) from a range of other, more estab lished, dis ci plines. We try to com pen sate for our rel a tive lack of a his tory, tra di tion or body of knowl edge by leverag ing oth ers’. That’s entirely appro pri ate — but how far does it get us? Interaction Design is an essen tial com po nent of the deliv ery of vir tu ally any prod uct or ser vice today. Many of us may already be at the point where we inter act with more dig i tal prod ucts in a day than we do phys i cal prod ucts, and many of the most impor tant trans ac tions in our lives are entirely vir tual. Maybe Interaction Design needs to be taken a bit more seriously?
In this talk I’d like to reflect on my almost 20 years as an inter ac tion designer — the things I’ve learned along the way, and the things I wish I would have learned at Interaction Design School, if such a thing had existed back then. Along the way we’ll review some of the 101 things we all should have learned in Interaction Design School, sourced from ixd101.com (the blog I share with Matt Morphett), and beyond.
