Designing Interactions
Author
Bill Moggridge (1943–2012), British industrial designer. He designed the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer with the now-familiar clamshell form, in 1979–1982; co-founded IDEO in 1991 with David Kelley and Mike Nuttall; and served as director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum from 2010 until his death. With Bill Verplank he coined the term "interaction design."
Publication Details
Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 766 pp., with an accompanying DVD of interview video. ISBN 978-0-262-13474-3.[1]
Description
The book is an oral history rather than a manual. Moggridge interviewed roughly forty people who made the objects and conventions that interaction design now takes for granted, and organised their accounts into eleven chapters covering the mouse and the desktop, the personal computer, the design of digital products and services, entertainment and games, the internet, multisensory and multimedia work, people and prototypes, the future of futures, and his own account of the GRiD Compass.
The interview list is the book's substance: Doug Engelbart on the invention of the mouse; Stu Card on the modelling that made it work; Larry Tesler and Tim Mott on the origins of cut, copy and paste at Xerox PARC; Bill Atkinson on QuickDraw and HyperCard; Terry Winograd; Brenda Laurel on games and gender; Will Wright on The Sims; Marc Rettig; Paul Mercer; Rob Haitani on the Palm Pilot's interaction model; Jun Rekimoto; Hiroshi Ishii on tangible interfaces; Bill Buxton; Bill Gaver on cultural probes; Jeff Hawkins; Cordell Ratzlaff on Mac OS X.
Key Ideas
- Interaction design as a discipline with a history. The book's implicit claim is that the field's conventions were choices made by identifiable people for stated reasons, not natural facts about computers.
- Prototyping as thinking. A recurring theme across interviews: the design was found by building rough versions, not specified in advance. Hawkins's block of wood carried in a pocket to test the Palm Pilot's size is the canonical example.
- Designing for people rather than for technology. Moggridge's framing of the shift from designing objects to designing behaviour over time.
- Verbs, not nouns. Interaction design's material is duration and response — what happens after the click — rather than form.
Criticism
The book is heavily weighted towards Silicon Valley and towards the generation that built the graphical desktop; non-Western practice and the design of enterprise and infrastructural systems are largely absent. As a primary source on that particular lineage, however, it has few rivals.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Every convention the book documents is a piece of installed cognitive infrastructure — the mouse, the cursor, the file, the undo. These are the interfaces through which most people now think, and the book is a record of the moment before they became invisible.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Designing Interactions, MIT Press.
