The IxD Library

Klemmer, Scott, Hartmann, Bjorn, and Takayama, Leila, “How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design,” 2006.

This paper presents five themes that we believe are particularly salient for designing and evaluating interactive systems. The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning. The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition. The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances. Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation. Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-computer interactions. The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path.

Michael Mateas, “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner” (2007)

Procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners, that its opposite, procedurally illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media. In fact, one can argue that procedural literacy is a fundamental competence for everyone, required full participation in contemporary society, that believing only programmers (people who make a living at it) should be procedurally literate is like believing only published authors need to learn how to read and write; here I will restrict myself to the case of new media scholars and practitioners.

By procedural literacy I mean the ability to read and write processes, to engage procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the interplay between the culturally-embedded practices of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes. With appropriate programming, a computer can embody any conceivable process; code is the most versatile, general process language ever created. Hence, the craft skill of programming is a fundamental component of procedural literacy, though it is not the details of any particular programming language that matters, but rather the more general tropes and structures that cut across all languages.

Jon Kolko, “Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience” (2009)

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential—the need—for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale.

Paul Atkinson, “The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: The Computer Mouse in the History of Computing” (pdf) (2007)

The history of the mouse raises a number of interesting questions: Why did it take so long to become a mass-produced item? How did people react to the introduction of the mouse? What did the mouse represent, and what does it represent today? How and why did it become the single most accepted interface technology?

There is no denying that the computer mouse is a phenomenally successful product in its own right – a success which can be measured by how ‘natural’ a product it has become as an everyday object. So familiar, that it disappears from our observational and analytical ‘radars’ to become an object people do not stop to consider. Yet, despite this success, few people are aware of its full history, of the way in which it was first conceived and then appropriated by the computer industry, or of the ways in which it has been used, intentionally and unintentionally, to shape our social and technological worlds.

Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, “Semiotics in Product Design” (pdf) 2002

“Make It So: What Interaction Designers can Learn from Science Fiction Interfaces” (2008)

Michael Nielsen, Moritz Störring, Thomas B. Moeslund, and Erik Granum, “A Procedure For Developing Intuitive And Ergonomic Gesture Interfaces For Man-Machine Interaction” (pdf) (2003)

Rob Tannen, “Ergonomics for Interaction Designers” Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (2009)

Karen McGrane, “Foundations of Interaction Design” (2008)

Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (2004)

Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing (2005)

Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman, Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology (2007)

Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain (2008)

This book might be the most complete look at what a design managers, VPs of design, or creative directors should be doing to improve their products.

Chris Bernard, “Designing for Interaction: Building a Vision for Innovation in Interaction Design” (2008)

Bill DeRouchey, “Learning Interaction Design from Everyday Objects” (2006)

Marc Rettig, “Interaction Design History in a Teeny Little Nutshell” (2004)

Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006)

Matt Jones, “The Demon-Haunted World” (2009)

Ian McDonald, River of Gods (2007)

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (2000)