I found this question a bit confusing. It raised a lot of questions. My instinct was to respond by asking, “What product does not involve interaction design?” Next, “What do you mean by product?”

Further, is this a question of form? What is the form of interaction design? How easily can you point to it like you can industrial or communication design? How does this question apply to services and organizations? We can say quite easily, that is a great service, or that organization really works well.

But when (if ever) we hear, “that’s great interaction design,” to what might someone be referring? Is that a true picture of interaction design? Could we answer Dan’s question with democracy, the Holocaust, Christianity?

While I did not go to this year’s IxDA conference, I was glad to hear the dialogue about what is interaction design kicked up again by Robert Fabricant’s keynote, wherein he stated interaction design is not about computing technology, it’s about behavior. Given my perspective on interaction design, this is not a surprise to me. What is surprising is people feeling that this is wrong.

What’s even more surprising is that what Robert said is nothing new or shocking. In Designing for Interaction, arguably the most accessible book on interaction design, Dan Saffer says, in the very first chapter, “interaction desing is about behavior.” And that was way back in 2006!

Notwithstanding, there are areas of focus for interaction design, and there is overlap with other design disciplines. But I totally agree with Dan and Robert, interaction is about behavior. And it has nothing inherently to do with making wireframes, interfaces, websites, or computing technology. Why this is new or shocking, I don’t know. But if the assertion miffs enough people in the community to cause a stir, then we need to have a talk and sort it out. Because believing interaction design is about computing technology is not healthy for the future of interaction design.

Tony is an interesting character. He can easily reach the top of any white board and gives thoughtful responses to the questions put to him. He believes that 2nd Road is fundamentally challenging the world view of organizations. “I’m driven by a revolution in organization fabric,” he says. Organizations have been built for stability and not innovation. They kill innovation. His firm helps organizations build what they call innovation capability.

Essentially, his firm seems to be an alternative to industrial age management thinking. And while design thinking is part of their process and information design is a core skill within the firm, they prefer to call themselves management consultants and work with upper management to create vision and strategy, build skills for new thinking, change systems, and change organizational culture. They are already at the table where designers sometimes desire to be. I’m a bit unclear how 2nd Road got there, but it seems like that’s where they started, or at least very near there. Tony argued that if you start in the marketing and consumer space, it’s harder to move up because you’ve been put into a box.

I wonder if designers in the consumer space really want to be at the table, or at the table in the same way in which 2nd Road participates. Transforming organizations seems like an entirely different wicked monster to deal with. But it certainly does pay well. While I won’t divulge the numbers, a three-day Strategic Conversation costs their clients more than you make in a year. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a San Francisco design consultancy that seemed to suggest their consulting workshops with management did not yield much income.

If I had to pull a definition of design from the way he talked about it, I’d say it is upfront conceptual thinking. “Tomorrow doesn’t exist,” he says, “You can’t analyze it.” Through rhetoric, 2nd Road invents tomorrow through dialogue, creating worlds through words (or visualizations). It seems that conversation plays a large role in their offerings. As much as possible, they want the client to own the process.

In terms of where they operate, Tony says they work in third and fourth order design. If you’ve never taken a class with Richard Buchanan, you likely don’t know what that means, which makes me wonder if it’s useful to describe design in this way. Simply, it means they are using design for services, environments, systems, and the interconnectedness of systems as opposed to design that is concerned with communication and forms. They work on highly complex and highly ambiguous problems that take place over the course of years rather than days, weeks, or months.

I’m curious about how design works in this arena, which is why I am talking to 2nd Road about opportunities to work with them. I’m curious about how this type of firm is different from design consultancies like IDEO, Frog, and Adaptive Path. I’m also curious how similar or dissimilar they are to the big management consulting companies or an innovation strategy firm, like Doblin. Good questions to ask in the next round of talks, I suppose.

Overall, Tony’s visit makes concrete some of the more abstract ideas about the role of design in organizational change that we have been discussing throughout the semester. But it’s noteworthy that they don’t call themselves a design firm. I wonder what that means for the discipline. Is design something that business consultants can consume and make their own, or can it stand on its own, and as Dan Saffer recently said, smash the table altogether?

Design has some valuable roots in its ties with emotion, but in many ways we’ve lost touch. Can we bring a sophisticated discussion of “emotion” back on the table and include it in our design process?

I don’t know if we’ve lost touch or if emotion has been neglected in the bustle of quickly changing technology and products. But I think we can do more to bring emotion into the process. There might be an expectation that design is by default about emotion, and it does not need much attention.

Looking at my Basic Interaction design syllabus, emphasis is placed on the design process and methods. Although some of the methods, like personas and narrative scenarios are supposed to help get at the motivations and the experience, and by extension, the emotions. Video sketching is another method that I think helps to understand what the emotional aspects of the product might be like. Though we typically talk about video sketching as being about the experience, which leads me to ponder the relationship of emotion and experience in design (thesis paper topic for some grad student?).

I remember a recent comment about “shit in, shit out” in regards to the design process, which I took to mean you get what you bring into it. If you aren’t excited about the design process or problem, for example, your solution will not be very exciting. Perhaps if you are not emotional or consider emotion throughout the process, emotion will not be a strong component of your solution.

Last semester, when Kip and I were working on our TSA service design project, we spent a lot of time considering the emotional aspect of going through airport security. Taking lots of photos of people in context and having those photos surround us during design meetings really helped keep emotion at the forefront of our discussions. Though it also helped that we are both very aware of and keen to recognize the role of emotion in design.

Another suggestion I heard last summer at Adaptive Path came from Dan Saffer, who suggested considering the aesthetics sooner using an image, music, or word. This is similar to my experience with the TSA project, where we referred to certain photos to constantly remind us of the emotions involved currently and those we wanted the end result to embody.

I got back from the first Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction08, late Monday night after an 11-hour drive in a rented minivan with five other of my Carnegie Mellon peers. Rather than provide a blow-by-blow, I’ll apply a little bit of poetic license and start at the end.

At the end of the second day of the two-day affair, in lieu of one of the presentations, anyone who wanted to share their thoughts on the conference and what it should be next year was invited to attend a group meeting. At first, I wasn’t going to go, but one of my peers, Kyle Vice, was going, and the previous presentations were not inspiring me.

Kyle and I were the only ones to show up, initially. But eventually a small band arrived, totaling nine, though most were already IxDA board members. Thus, CMU students represented 25 percent of attendees. Not counting the board members, 50 percent. Gregory Petroff led the session and asked each of us to say why we came, what we thought could have been better, and what we would like to see next year. That seems like a reasonable way to construct this post.

Why did I attend?

I agreed with Bill DeRouchey, who was also present, who said that it felt important to be at the first conference on interaction design. I also mentioned that as an interaction design graduate student, who has been in the bubble of academia for the past two years, I wanted to see what the discipline thinks of itself, and contrast that against my thoughts of interaction design attained at Carnegie Mellon. What I didn’t say was that at the School of Design, we explore interaction design is a broad sense, and often talk about design and interaction design interchangeably. In design, there is no subject matter. My peers and I bring this perspective to interaction design and are thus interested in applications of interaction design beyond the screen and software.

Many of my peers were frustrated and angry with a lot of the presentations, as was I. Though I was tempered by the expectation that there would not be much new material, given that my life is currently devoted to the study of interaction design. That said, we found the application of interaction design by the representative community narrow, which brings me to the second question: what could have been better?

What could have been better?

I told the group that I would have liked to have seen a discussion and attempt at defining interaction design. Of all places and times to address this question, the first conference on interaction design seemed to be a likely place. And as this is a question that plagues every interaction designer, and serves as fodder for heated debate on the IxDA discussion list, I hoped it would receive some attention. Instead, the definition of interaction design escaped discussion, which I found disappointing. In relation to this, I also said that I would have liked to have seen a greater exploration of the boundaries of interaction design. What I didn’t say, and what my peers echoed, was that interface and software received too much attention. Surprisingly, there was very little presented regarding mobile interaction, physical products, ambient devices, gestural interaction, wearables, ubiquitous computing, and the role of interaction design in experience design, service design, organizational change.

Ironically, during the closing remarks, Dan Saffer listed five themes he garnered from the conference. The first was that we were exploring the boundaries of interaction design. In addition, he remarked that we skipped the question of the definition of interaction design, which received cheers from the crowd. This distressed me for the reasons stated above.

Five Themes

Since I brought it up, now seems like a good time to go over the five themes, mentioned in Saffer’s closing remarks.

Boundaries Where is our role? What defines us? Answer: comes from what we’re working on; common tools and prototyping

Tradition Not practicing in a vacuum

Context Space/time; organizations

Argument Providing tools for argument; and products are an argument

Influence How the products we create influence the way people behave

As I said, I did not think there was enough exploration of the boundaries, evidenced by the gap between what my peers and I think of interaction design and what we saw as practice at the conference. I disagree that what defines us is what we’re working on. It may be how others currently perceive interaction designers because other opportunities do not exist. But it doesn’t define us.

In talking with other attendees, I was glad to hear that people entertain the application of interaction design to more arenas. But it seemed evident that everyone was limited by their current circumstance and no place else to go. This is a fear that many of the students at the School of Design have when considering employment opportunities. If this is the situation, perhaps interaction design needs to design its way into other areas.

What would I like to see next year?

In the meeting, I said it would be great to see more representation from outside the community, like business and management. And for presentations, it might be nice to see designers and clients presenting both sides of the endeavor. What I didn’t say, perhaps because I felt it was assumed by my earlier comments, was that I would like to see a good and constructive discussion of the definition of interaction design, or some acknowledgment of the struggle. We did this at the Emergence conference with the question of service design both in the first and second year, and people seemed to respect the discussion and appreciate the struggle.

In addition, it would be great to see more case studies with actual projects. Heck, it would have been interesting to hear about the role of interaction design in the Charmr project. But what about interaction design for a service design project? Or the process of interaction design in organizational strategy?

One of the group participants mentioned a forum where attendees could show their work. This is an intriguing idea, which would allow greater attendee participation and provide greater exposure to the different types of work in interaction design. One project on interaction design in an area that is off the radar could spark debate and inspire curiosity and further broadening of current practice.

The Good

OK, now that I’ve offered some criticism, constructively, I hope, let’s talk about the good.

Dan Saffer, who according to my understanding, put together a lot of the content, did a great job of attracting some quality speakers. I especially enjoyed seeing Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton (not that I agreed with them). And I could see the attempt to have both practical and more philosophical presentations. Other speakers I enjoyed include Matt Jones and Carl DiSalvo.

Savannah is a great location to have a conference in February. T-shirt weather. Not too big. Lots of bars and restaurants. Also, the Savannah Collage of Art and Design was impressive. Carnegie Mellon should take note.

The food was top notch. Sunday’s lunch was better than any wedding I have ever attended. And parties with free food and booze are always welcome, and I would say essential for a successful conference.

As with any conference, the best part without doubt were the people that attended and the conversations that ensued. I was happy to run into designers who knew me from Emergence and UX Week, and to see some CMU alumni. Best yet, I made some new friends whom I hope to see at the next conference or elsewhere in the small but healthy interaction design community.

While I haven’t covered everything, these are the things that are resonating with me. I am happy that I went and feel that overall for the community it was a success. I am very curious to see how things shape up next year.

In total, eight interaction design graduate students from the School of Design attended the conference: Kipum Lee, Srividya Sriram, Carrie Chan, Kyle Vice, Beste Nazilli, Joe Iloreta, Imran Sobh, me.