Tuesday, September 9, 2003

All Things in Moderation

I'm not sure how or why I was chosen, but I was asked to moderate a weeklong discussion for the new interaction architects community. The topic: Target Membership. Who should be included in a new group? Who should be excluded? How do we judge this? Job title, deliverables, position within the company?

I wrote up a brief opening salvo, which I'll excerpt here:

Our membership should include anyone who creates or develops (or oversees the creation and development of) interactions, be they digital or not...

By interaction, I mean a relationship between two things, filtered through a medium (such as a computer, phone, toy, environments, etc.).
And by relationship I mean that (ideally) the two things would be able to react and adjust to the input provided by the other.

I know this is pretty broad, but so is our field, encompassing people who design the interactions for cell phones, 3D worlds, gaming, wearables, "smart" rooms, robots, toasters, alarm clocks, cars, medical equipment, and, yes, websites and "traditional" applications.

I would also caution us not us use deliverables as instruments of exclusion. Lots of people have many different ways of approaching the same problem. What is important is that a design process (as opposed to, say, a business analysis or a programming methodology) that is user-centric is used for problem solving.

Some of this language is straight out of the interaction design bible, as preached by Dan Boyarski and Dick Buchanan and the other CMU faculty. I'm being indoctrinated!

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