In Summary
This text has defined Interaction Design in a way that emphasizes the intellectual and cultural facets of the discipline. It has discussed the role that language, argument, and rhetoric play in the design of products, services, and systems. This idea of language is extended to poetry, and the text has introduced the idea of a poetic interaction—an interaction that affects not only the mind and body but also the soul.
The text has also examined the process Interaction Designers use when they approach complicated problems related to behavior and time. This process includes structuring large quantities of data, thinking about users, and attempting to support human behavior as it unfolds over time.
The text has introduced the idea of Interaction Design as an integral facet of emerging culture that is often related to but inherently separate from the traditional business development process. Interaction Design, when successful, is positioned as a critical component of complex problem solving, not as some ancillary service that is called in at the end of a project.
And finally, the text has prescribed a purposeful extraction of Interaction Design from the confines of business to leverage the design process for social, political, and economic problem solving. Instead of developing websites and toasters, imagine what would happen if leading designers focused their design efforts on problems of a social scope. Consider the application of intellectual, methodical processes of design in the context of politics, or government. Could the economic stability of the United States or the social welfare of a developing country be considered design problems of a large scale?
Designer Milton Glaser has publicly declared that “Good design is good citizenship.” Consider what it means to be a citizen, good or not. The word implies an acknowledgment of others, of cultures, and of the social and political environment in which our creations will live. This negates the ego and hubris for hubris' sake that has tainted product design for the past decade.
In Stephen Heller's Citizen Designer, Allworth Press, 2003
Artists frequently use their work to comment on political, socioeconomic, and cultural issues. Art has been used as a method of understanding the nuances of culture during a specific time frame in history. As design is often described as a form of art, design solutions can be thought of as windows into the world of culture. These solutions often provide a glimpse of the value system present within a specific time period. The growing application of design within fields of branding, media, and mass marketing demonstrate an underlying consumer-based (and highly commercially driven) path through the information age.
Maurizio Vitta discusses this material culture in his text The Meaning of Design. He explains that cultural expectations are placed on a designer. These expectations are generally thought of as making life better (or at least making life prettier) but are frequently convoluted through issues of aesthetics or brand visualization. But the culture of objects is of central importance to understanding the culture of design. The objects themselves are embedded with a deep social significance and become the sign of philosophical and ideological resonance. As we consume, we in fact signify to ourselves and to the world around ourselves a particular value system. This becomes dramatically magnified when we consider the number of items that we have at our disposal to choose from. Essentially, the consumer can signify anything he wants by selecting appropriate goods, services, and systems. As these begin to lose their functional resonance and importance, the primary essence of a design becomes its ability to transfer language to a consumer. What something does seems to have become much less important than what it shows. In fact, the designer does create culture. He provides options, and through the signification process of these objects, a culture is established.
Vitta explains,
“On the one hand, indeed, in a reflected manner, [the designers] enjoy the same central role as that of the objects they design; on the other hand, their cultural character, although endowed with great prestige today, runs the risk of taking on the fragility and flimsiness of designed objects themselves.”
Vitta, Maurizio. The meaning of Design. In Victor Margolin's Design Discourse, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Design is transient. The culture we have helped create has as much attention deficit disorder as those participating in the culture.
It's now time to extract design from the confines of business and allow it to grow on its own. Positioned as social entrepreneurship, social innovation, or the new design, designers are fundamental in structuring a world worth living in. Human behavior is innately poetic; it is natural and thus resonates poetic in the same way as does a flower, or a bird, or a tree. It is through our own design of objects, services, and systems that we may have disturbed the poetry. A focus on technology or aesthetics alone creates a world of ideas that often seems discretely disconnected from humanity. Through the combination of technology, aesthetics, and humanity, we will find a world of Interaction Design. And Interaction Design, as the study of dialogue between people and things, will bring harmony to technological advancement.
