A (Very) Brief History of Interaction Design

There's a tendency to think that interaction design began around the time that Bill Moggridge named it, in 1990, but that's not really true. Interaction design probably began, although obviously not as a formalized discipline, in prerecorded history, when Native Americans and other tribal peoples used smoke signals to communicate over long distances, and the Celts and Inuit used stone markers called cairns or inukshuk as landmarks, to communicate over time (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4. A modern cairn. Cairns are products that transmit messages through time.

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Many centuries later, in the mid 1830s, Samuel Morse created a system to turn simple electromagnetic pulses into a language of sorts and to communicate those words over long distances; over the next 50 years, Morse code and the telegraph spread across the globe (Figure 1.5). Morse not only invented the telegraph, but also the entire system for using it: everything from the electrical systems, to the mechanism for tapping out the code, to the training of telegraph operators. This didn't happen overnight, naturally, but the telegraph was the first instance of communication technology that, unlike the printing press, was too sophisticated for a small number of people to install and use. It required the creators to design an entire system of use.

Figure 1.5. Morse code transmitter. The telegraph was the first technology system for communicating over long distances that required complex assembly and training to use.

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Similarly, other mass communication technologies, from the telephone to radio to television, required engineers to design systems of use and interfaces for the new technologies. And these systems and interfaces were needed not only for the receiving devicesthe telephones, radios, and television setsbut also for the devices used to create and send messages: the telephone switches, microphones, television cameras, control booths, and so on. All of these components required interaction design, although it certainly wasn't called that at the time.

But the machines that fueled these technologies were, for the most part, just that: machines. They responded to human input certainly, but not in a sophisticated way. They didn't have any awareness that they were being used. For that, we needed computers.

1940s to 1980s

The first wave of computersENIAC and its ilkwere engineered, not designed. Humans had to adapt to using them, not vice versa, and this meant speaking the machines' language, not ours. Entering anything into the computer required hours preparing a statement on punch cards or paper tape for the machine to read; these paper slips were the interface (Figure 1.6). Engineers expended very little design effort to make the early computers more usable. Instead, they worked to make them faster and more powerful, so the computers could solve complicated computational problems.

Figure 1.6. Punch cardsthe first interface with computers.

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Engineers began to focus on people only in the 1960s, when they started to devise new methods of input. Engineers added control panels to the front of computers, allowing input through a complicated series of switches, usually in combination with a set of punch cards that were processed as a group (batch processing). Meanwhile, at labs such as Xerox PARC and universities such as MIT, engineers and designers experimented with monitors for visual output, designed simple games, and explored new interfaces such as the mouse and light pen. Suddenly, many more applications for computers seemed possible, albeit to a small group of people. Visionaries such as Xerox PARC's Bob Taylor started thinking of computers not as just processing devices, but instead as communication devices. Over the next decade, the focus shifted from the computer itselfthe hardwareto the software that runs it.

Designers, programmers, and engineers in the 1970s introduced the command-line interface and such industry-defining software as VisiCalc and WordStar (Figure 1.7). Finally, companies started designing computers for people beyond computer scientists and trained operators. This new emphasis came to fruition in the early 1980s with the introduction by Apple Computer of the graphical user interface, first in the Lisa and then in the Macintosh, to a mass audience. Bulletin board systems (BBSs) like The WELL sprung up so that people could leave e-mail and messages for one another on remote computers using dial-up modems.

Figure 1.7. WordStar and its ilk were the first pieces of commercial software that weren't designed by programmers for programmers.

At the same time as these developments were occurring in the computing field, other disciplines that eventually informed interaction design were growing. Engineers and industrial designers such as Henry Dreyfuss created the new field of human factors, which focused on the design of products for different sizes and shapes of people. The field of ergonomics focused on workers' productivity and safety, determining the best ways to perform tasks. Cognitive psychology, focusing on human learning and problem solving, experienced a resurgence, led by such academics as Alan Newell and George Miller.

1990s to the Present

The era of networked computing and of interaction design as a formal discipline began in earnest during the 1990s. The World Wide Web, which allows anyone to easily publish hypertext documents accessible worldwide to anyone with a modem, and the mass adoption of e-mail brought the need for better interaction design to the forefront.

At the same time, engineers and designers began building sensors and microprocessors, which were getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, into things that weren't considered computers: cars, appliances, and electronic equipment. Suddenly, these physical objects could demonstrate kinds of behavior that they previously couldn't; they could display an "awareness" of their environment and of how they were being used that was previously inconceivable. Cars could monitor their own engines and alert drivers to problems before they occurred. Stereos could adjust their settings based on the type of music being played. Dishwashers could lengthen their wash cycles depending on how dirty the dishes were. All these behaviors needed to be designed and, most important, communicated to the human beings using the objects.

Other pieces of technology facilitated interactions among people, mostly in the entertainment space. Karaoke spread from bars in China and Japan to the United States (Figure 1.8). Arcade video games like Dance Dance Revolution allowed expression in front of crowds. Multiplayer games on computers and game consoles like the Sony Playstation facilitated competition and collaboration in new ways. Online communities like Everquest and The Sims Online incorporated sophisticated economies that rivaled those of offline countries.

Figure 1.8. Although the butt of jokes, the karaoke machine is a surprisingly rich example of interaction design. It provides a way to communicate emotionally with friends.

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Mobile phones and devices, which had existed since the 1980s, enjoyed explosive market growth in the 1990s. Today, billions of customers carry these devices with them. Starting as simply a means of making calls on the go, mobile phones can now contain a myriad of digital features that rival those of desktop computers. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) got off to a shaky start with the failure of Apple's Newton in 1995, but by the end of the decade, they had gained traction with devices like the Palm Pilot and Blackberry PDAs. Computers, too, became mobile devices as laptops entered the market; by 2003 laptops were outselling desktops in the United States.

As the Internet matured, so did the technologies creating and driving it. Since the end of the 1990s, the Internet has become less about reading content than about doing things: executing stock trades, making new acquaintances, selling items, manipulating live data, sharing photos, making personal connections between one piece of content and another. The Internet also provides several new ways of communicating, among them instant messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (Figure 1.9). The Internet has become a platform for applications, in much the same way that Microsoft DOS once was, but these applications can take advantage of the many features of the Internet: collective actions like the SETI@home project in which people compete to see who can find extraterrestrial activity first, data that is collected passively from large numbers of people as with Amazon's "People who bought this also bought..." feature, far-flung social communities such as Yahoo Groups, aggregation of many sources of data in XML and RSS feeds, near real-time access to timely data like stock quotes and news, and easy sharing of content such as blogs.

Figure 1.9. Skype takes a familiar paradigm, the buddy list from instant messaging, and couples it with a new technology, Voice over IP (VoIP), to allow people to make phone calls over the Internet.

But it's not just the Internetit's also access to the Internet, through broadband connections and WiFi wireless networks, that is changing the types of interactions we can have and where we can have them. There's never been a better time to be an interaction designer. The discipline's future contains both many challenges and many possibilities.

Marc Rettig on Interaction Design's History and Future

courtesy of Marc Rettig

Marc Rettig is a designer, educator, and researcher, as well as founder and principal of Fit Associates. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Design (where he held the 2003 Nierenberg Distinguished Chair of Design) and the Institute of Design, IIT, in Chicago. Marc served as chief experience officer of the user experience firm HannaHodge and was a director of user experience at Cambridge Technology Partners.

When does the history of interaction design begin?

I'll pick the work at Xerox PARC on the Star interface as a very early example of self-conscious interaction design, the publication of which influenced others to begin working in a similar way. As just one example, the idea of associating a program with a picture was born there. We call them icons, and forget what a breakthrough connection between interface element and underlying meaning that once was. That was the early-to-mid 1970s, and the Star papers are still great reading.

What fields have had the greatest influence on interaction design?

As it is currently practiced? Well, software development and graphic design. To some extent, industrial design. A dab of psychology and human factors. A dab of business.

What I imagine we need more of: filmmaking and theater, biology, counseling and therapy (the professionals at acquiring and checking an empathic point of view), maybe anthropology. And especially linguisticssome new branch of linguistics that nobody is yet carving out: the linguistics of designed interactions.

What can interaction designers learn from noninteractive tools?

I'd like to spin the question slightly by observing that to an interaction designer, watching a tool in use is the same as observing a conversation. Everything, in a sense, has its inputs and outputs. From that point of view, the boundary between "interactive" and "noninteractive" tools starts to dissolve.

Interaction design is largely about the meaning that people assign to things and events, and how people try to express meanings. So to learn from any tool, interactive or not, go watch people using it. You'll hear them talk to the tool. You'll see them assign all sorts of surprising interpretations to shapes, colors, positioning, dings, dents, and behaviors. You'll see them fall in love with a thing as it becomes elegantly worn. You'll see them come to hate a thing and choose to ignore it, sell it, or even smash it. And I guarantee you won't have to do much of this before you encounter someone who makes a mental mapping you would never dream possible. And you'll learn from that.

I've been using tea kettles as an example in some of my teaching, because on the one hand kettles are so familiar to us, and they're only interactive in a borderline, predictable, mechanical sort of way. But once you start to examine the meanings involved with kettles in use, you realize they have things to say that people would love to know, but most designs don't allow them to be said. "I'm getting hot, but I have no water in me." "My water is a good temperature for a child's cocoa." "I'm too hot to touch." "I need to be cleaned." And so on. I'd love the chance to take a serious interaction design approach to something like a tea kettle.