Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Interaction Design Philosophy & Interaction-Design.org

One of the most ambitious sources of (open) scholarship in the field of HCI and interaction design is today found at  Interaction-Design.org. This site is filled with content from some of the most distinguished researchers and designers in the field. I just got an email from interaction-design.org about their newest addition to the encyclopedia. It is an article called Philosophy of Interaction and the Interactive User Experience. The article is written by Dag Svanaes and has substantial comments from Don Norman and Eva Hornecker. Svanaes is ambitious in his approach to reveal the philosophy of the field. This is highly recommendable even for those who might not agree with his analysis. We definitely need more texts like this in the field. Many more.

It is great that we do have interaction-design.org as a source of quality materials that is also free to anyone interested. The site also includes a great calendar of conferences and deadlines and bibliographies of many researchers in the field. Mads Soegaard who is the Editor-in-Chief for this endeavor is doing a great job.
 

2 comments:

Gim, Hyewon said...

This is really a great article. I think I need to rewrite my paper of the bodily interaction. I am embarrassed. Thank you for letting me know this article. When it comes to the matter of the phenomenology that the author mentioned, designing something is always challenging for me. I feel like I have to be very knowledgeable to capture everything about users and technology systems. Perhaps, good designed artifacts (interactivity and interface in either tangible or intangible aspects) are not ideals forms, but fitting forms which have evolved through adaptation processes within certain socio-cultural, economical, and technological contexts. From my limited view, the cognitive perspective in the early age of HCI discourse represents one of the main prejudiced perspectives that we had interested. So, we can criticize it now based on the knowledge and look for other theory to make up the limitation of the previous one. Then, we can move on toward designing better things. Sorry for that my idea is too long here.

Mads Søgaard said...

Dear Erik,

Thanks so much for your kind words - that really means a *lot* to us!

All the very best wishes from the team behind Interaction-Design.org !