What is interaction design for you? Our class discussed what IAD is for us, and also how we explain our work to people who are not familiar with this topic.
The Meaning of Interaction Design
As the etymological origin of the word “interaction” may reveals, it means for me, to force people or even the society to an action through our design. The addition “inter-” places these actions in a context of another object. This could be a machine or an individual/human being.
In my opinion, our work is tightly bound to emotions of our users, which eventually end up in actions. By knowing how to trigger these emotions (and also which actions could emerge out of them), an interaction designer is therefore able to bias people in their deeds. IAD Theory talks a lot about affordances; The way, an object/design/message affords someone to do something, follows the same principle.
Interaction Design has no scale. Our Design can be really small or really big. To achieve our goals we have to know a big amount of techniques as well as technologies.
Interaction Design Methods
We briefly talked about methods of (interaction) design, in particular about the excursive method, where six fields are settled; Investigation, play, everyday, tensions, enactment and dissemination.
Interaction Design Blog 