Interaction design

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.

Interaction design borrows from a wide range of fields like psychology, human-computer interaction, information architecture, and user research to create designs that are tailored to the needs and preferences of users. This involves understanding the context in which the product will be used, identifying user goals and behaviors, and developing design solutions that are responsive to user needs and expectations.

While disciplines such as software engineering have a heavy focus on designing for technical stakeholders, interaction design is focused on meeting the needs and optimizing the experience of users, within relevant technical or business constraints.

Interaction designers are often employed as user experience (UX) or user interface (UI) designers. Interaction design is "concerned with dialogues that extend across both the material and the virtual and involve control and representation technologies". Interaction designers are experts in working with design complexity as they typically work on problems that have many possible users, in many possible contexts, to create software with many possible states. Widely used interaction design tools (like Figma or Adobe XD) can be understood as providing interaction designers with a way of managing the complexity.

The term interaction design was coined by Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank in the mid-1980s, but it took 10 years before the concept started to take hold. To Verplank, it was an adaptation of the computer science term user interface design for the industrial design profession. To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software.

The earliest programs in design for interactive technologies were the Visible Language Workshop, started by Muriel Cooper at MIT in 1975, and the Interactive Telecommunications Program founded at NYU in 1979 by Martin Elton and later headed by Red Burns.

The first academic program officially named "Interaction Design" was established at Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, as a Master of Design in Interaction Design. At the outset, the program focused mainly on screen interfaces, before shifting to a greater emphasis on the "big picture" aspects of interaction—people, organizations, culture, service and system.

In 1990, Gillian Crampton Smith founded the Computer-Related Design MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, which in 2005 was renamed Design Interactions, headed by Anthony Dunne. In 2001, Crampton Smith helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), a specialized institute in Olivetti's hometown in Northern Italy, dedicated solely to interaction design. In 2007, after IDII closed due to a lack of funding, some of the people originally involved with IDII set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), in Denmark. After Ivrea, Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor added the Interaction Design (IxD) track in the Visual and Multimedia Communication at the University of Venice, Italy.