blindedbox

Design has been a primary consumer of thought and activity for the majority of my 34 years. I’m constantly reflective of my discipline while navigating both practice and academia. I have and continue to exploit any resource (books, people, television, conferences, etc) through any media to define “design”.  Today I still can’t holistically define it or at least it changes with every conversation or writing.

The very word design has become a common household term and yet given quite specific and different meanings by particular groups of people. Let me note that design is both a noun and a verb and can refer to either the end product or the process. Specifically, I believe Interaction Design is primarily about design as process (but that’s an entirely different discussion). The discussion here results from constant reflection and presents thoughts and a theory (the design equation) defining Interaction Design.

As designers, we always come across our forefathers classic design definitions, such as this beauty by Charles Eames;

“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”

But whenever I regurgitated these Utopian definitions they always seem to add confusion over clarity. Try telling your parents (or better yet your grandmother) “you arrange elements for a particular purpose” the next time they asks “what is it you do again?”. Sure, conversation is audience specific and defining design to parents and grandparents begins with limitations but the very word “design” is in their everyday use too.

The word and its meaning has crept outside the minds and conversations of its core disciplines and practitioners. Look around you, your world is largely (if not completely) fabricated by humans. You cannot escape interacting with your environment without directly or indirectly, being affected by design.

In my journey to create a definition that made meaning specific to me, I took the most literal approach I could. I started with a base understanding of what a “definition” meant. The following is a dictionary snippet;

[A definition is a statement of the meaning of a word or phrase. The term to be defined is known as the definiendum (Latin: that which is to be defined). The words which define it are known as the definiens (Latin: that which is doing the defining).]

Aside from the technical aspects, another major influence was the thinking of Kurt Zadek Lewin. Lewin a German-born psychologist is one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology. He is often recognized as the “founder of social psychology” and was one of the first researchers to study group dynamics and organizational development. Actually, I often come across Lewin’s work when studying Interaction Design because of the strong parallels between human and environment interaction (human-to-computer). But for the purpose of defining design I was strictly interested in his “psychological equation of behavior” he calls The Lewin’s Equation. What interest me the most was the simplicity and efficiency of the construct. Specifically, the use of symbols to form an equation to (what words often laboriously do) explain a complex term.

The Lewin’s Equation is B=ƒ(P,E). It states that “behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment”. (The Lewin’s Equation: B – Behaviour; f – Function; P – Person; E – Environment therefore B=ƒ(P,E).)

This was the foundation I wanted to build from. So after several days in the studio and several whiteboard markers later, I came up with a “design equation” in an attempt to resolve my internal struggles of defining “design”. The result is as follows;

Let me break it down a bit more, building off the theory of “behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment”… therefore Interaction Design (IxD) equals (=) a change in (triangle symbol) behaviour (B) in people (P) and environment (E). And if I was to stick to the left-brain dictionary definition framework than the definiendum is “Interaction Design” and the definiens is a “mathematical equation”.

Arguably, all [interaction] designers could probably agree, directly or indirectly, that this definition applies to their practice. But do we even need a simple definition of design or should we accept that design is too complex a matter to be summarized?

The answer is probably that we shall never really find a single satisfactory definition but that the searching is much more important than the finding.

For more traditional definitions of design disciplines – click here

The Interaction Designer is a story-weaver – scripting the narrative between man and machine – the dialogue of system response to user action. Goals, behavior and flow are significant strategic concerns, but this skill goes beyond making interfaces relevant and usable. IxD (Interaction Design) marries personality with each interaction story, creating a system with which users make an emotional connection. Interaction Design and Visual Communication work together to breathe life into software UI. IxD defines the way the user manipulates the interface and Visual Communication determines how that looks in concert with all the other visual elements on screen. Blending analysis and creativity – working between artistry and engineering – Interaction Design concepts muster team consensus around what to build via the user interface layer.

Scenarios, flow diagrams, interaction models, prototypes and wireframes are typical deliverables of interaction design. They capture the desired user experience that is translated into a functional specification.