Interaction design

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While the digital side of this statement is true, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) products, exploring how a user might interact with it. Common topics of interaction design include design, human–computer interaction, and software development. While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what clearly marks IxD as a design field as opposed to a science or engineering field.

While disciplines such as software engineering have a heavy focus on designing for technical stakeholders, interaction design is geared toward satisfying the majority of users.

The term interaction design was coined by Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank in the mid-1980s, but it took 10 years before other designers the concept started to take hold. To Verplank, it was an adaptation of the computer science term user interface design for the industrial design profession. To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software.

The earliest programs in design for interactive technologies were the Visible Language Workshop, started by Muriel Cooper at MIT in 1975, and The Interactive Telecommunications Program founded at NYU in 1979 by Martin Elton and later headed by Red Burns.

The first academic program officially named "Interaction Design" was established at Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 as a Master of Design in Interaction Design. At the outset, the program focused mainly on screen interfaces, before shifting to a greater emphasis on the "big picture" aspects of interaction—people, organizations, culture, service and system.

In 1990, Gillian Crampton Smith founded the Computer-related Design MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, changed in 2005 to Design Interactions, headed by Anthony Dunne. In 2001, Crampton Smith helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a small institute in Olivetti's hometown in Northern Italy, dedicated solely to interaction design. The institute moved to Milan in October 2005 and merged with Domus Academy. In 2007, some of the people originally involved with IDII set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). After Ivrea, Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor added the Interaction Design (IxD) track in the Visual and Multimedia Communication at Iuav, University of Venice, Italy, between 2006 and 2014.

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