Perspectives of Interaction Design
Week 2, Interaction Design Methods
Innovations through competition
In the late 1780 the industrial revolution began and factories have been built. Trains were invented, which spread all the new ideas. In World Fairs all the new inventions were shown and the countries started to compete each other.
The communication became more and more important. A good example for an invention in this time is the Eiffel Tower which was built for the world fair of 1889 in Paris. With the Assembly-line work in the early 20th century the worker had to interact with production machines and costumers had to learn to interact with the machines or devices. The design of the user interface was usually defined by engineers or later by industrial designers.
Digitalisation
With the invention of the computer the interaction between human and machine became rather complex and more important. In the 1960s universities in the US started to connect each other with peer-to-peer networks. The internet, a computer network built by the US-Air Force in 1968, changed the communication world. Some years later the Personal Computer (PC) was invented. With the release of the graphical user interface (GUI) by Xerox PARC and later Apple the user experience changed radically. The desktop metaphor, a revolutionary interaction design concept, changed the way we are using computers up to now. With the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1990 it was easily possible to jump from one document to another just by clicking to an hyperlink even if those documents are on different computers anywhere in the world. With the urge to find something in the web, search engines emerged, like Yahoo and AltaVista in 1995 and Google in 1997. By this time also multimedia application became popular and changed again how people interacted with computer. Communication over computer like Skype and social networks like Facebook or Instagram became more important. Nowadays, smartphones are our most important and personal devices for our every day communication. In order for ordinary people to be able to control and operate all these devices, it is necessary that their use is simple and intuitive. This shows the growing importance of interaction design.
Design Rules
A designer always follows some rules. These rules makes a product useful and user friendly. A timeless design can emerge from it. A famous example of rules are the 10 Principles of a “Good Design” by Dieter Rams. His designs for Braun were the templates for apple product design. Rules can be deliberately ignored as a statement. Designers like Bruno Munari or Didier Faustino use this to built design objects which are between art and design.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 10.03.2019
Interaction Design, Zurich University of Arts
Sources:
wikipedia.org
www.express.co.uk/life-style/top10facts/1020431/top-ten-facts-lifts
cnet.com
didierfaustino.com
