Why Practice Interaction Design?

In poem after poem, the late barfly poet extraordinaire Charles Bukowski noted that it wasn't the big things that drove people mad, it was the small stuff: little things not going well, small irritants that over time made you crazythe leaking faucet, the stains that won't come out of clothes, the mobile phone that won't dial. Interaction designers try to ameliorate some of that annoyance, making sure that the products and services people deal with make sense, are usable and useful, and are even engaging and fun. Some of what good interaction designers do is make the world better by removing those little irritants in life, some of which we don't know exist until they are gone.

Humans have an amazing tendency to become accustomed to the terrible, inconvenient, and awkward. We can live with horrible situations for long periods until something better comes along, something we may not have even known we needed. Take the telephone, for instance. For decades, all calls had to be routed through a human operator, who (if she or he felt like it) could also listen in on your call (Figure 1.11). Dial phones weren't introduced until 1919, and it wasn't until the 1950s80 years after the phone was inventedthat direct distance dialing (DDD) allowed callers to dial long-distance without the help of an operator. The last manual phones weren't phased out until the 1970salmost a hundred years after they were introduced!

Figure 1.11. Old telephone exchange. Imagine all your long-distance calls being routed through this. Now imagine having to operate it for long periods of time.

iStockphoto

But interaction design isn't only about fixing problems; it's also about facilitating interactions between people in richer, deeper, better waysthat is, finding new ways to better connect human beings to one another, and by doing so, make the world a better place to live. The Internet would be a collection of servers and wires without Web browsers, e-mail clients, games, blogging tools, social networking sites, and instant messaging and VoIP programs. These productsthese designed productslike the smoke signals and cairns of our ancient ancestors, allow us to connect with one another through time and space. It's easy to forget this in the middle of a harried project, but the work that interaction designers do matters in profound ways. Interaction designers change the world, a little at a time, through the products and services they create.