We’re all annoyed by things that don’t work. Every article, blog post or book chapter about good design out there seems to start with examples of bad design. In fact, Donald Norman’s very famous book, The Design of Everyday Things, which I’m currently reading, is essentially the picking apart of the failures and weaknesses of everyday things’ designs. I’ve been thinking lately about what first made me interested in Interaction Design. Was it my frustration at all the poorly designed things? The desire to make them better? In all honesty, I was interested in it long before it had a name to associate it with. I think everyone has a little interest in it, whether they know it or not. But, perhaps the motivation or the reason that certain people actually want to shape the design from an interaction stand point, rather than participate as a user, is some desire to prevent these design follies or some belief that one has the power, knowledge, or imagination to anticipate, sight, and prevent designs from coming up short. I think you have to be a bit of a visionary or fancy yourself something like that. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re really that creative but you understand people and the depths of functionality. Or maybe you’re really into coding and software engineering, but value the feedback from users equally. There’s something about Interaction Design that makes me feel it isn’t merely driven by the desire to make things work better or to make beautiful things that function pretty well. It seems to delve deeper into the questions of “why?” and “how?” It’s, ideally, the pursuit of an intuitive functionality that, being inherently designed for the specific or general users as applicable, can’t help but also be simple, clear and beautiful.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I have this idea in my head that this is what interaction design is. I think one thing I can say for the job I have now is that it’s taught me that very often, what you expect to be doing day-to-day in a particular position, based on your previous knowledge, is complete rubbish. There’s only so much that can be garnered from job postings. I don’t know how anyone can ever be sure they will really love a job or fit in just by reading a posting and having one hour of interviewing. Certainly visiting the office helps, by showing the interviewee what that work environment looks like and how people dress, but that is about it. However, that is another topic.
Mostly, I’m thinking about my motivations and my passions. The things I expect will stick around with me throughout my life, and then I’m trying to match them to my proposed professional future to see if they line up. It’s always tough to tell in your own mind, with your own loud and quiet thoughts, whether you’re really doing something because you want to or because you think you should. Without the pushy parents of some of my peers to drive me on toward specific things, I’ve been fairly self-steered, if a little naïvely at times. But we all have our own little mini-parents in our heads telling us that this particular road might be very nice because it will let us pay off our loans quickly, while an opposing side tells us to just drop everything and move to Europe, where I know I want to be, and give it my all to make it work. Practical? Who can say? There’s only one way to find out…
Things I’ve liked for a really long (“long” in my youthful perspective of “time”, that is) time:
Music
Architecture (Lloyd-Wright, Rennie Mackintosh, Le Corbusier, Art Deco, etc.)
High and unique fashion
Design [intentional and unintentional] (as seen in interior design, systems like public transit, cars, websites, logos, nature, symmetry)
Studying languages (Studied French 5 years, Czech 2 years and Swedish off and on 3 years)
Society (majored in geography and sociology)
Exploring new places (long list of places I’d like to see)
Astronomy (nothing too advanced in the physics department, please, but a little chemistry is ok)
Reading (humorous fiction mostly)
The brain (why it does what it does and how)
Do these fit together to make an Interaction Designer?
(Not that you have to incorporate all of your interests into your career. That’s what hobbies are for.)
Update:
I had to share this strange little Interaction Design-themed problem. Evidently, WordPress thinks I “liked” this very blog post, my own blog post, which I honestly did not do. However, it doesn’t really matter if I did or didn’t do it. The real problem is that once I noticed that somehow I’d “liked” my own post, there was no way to undo it. So not only is the functionality hindered in the first place, but either a) wordpress made a mistake and thought I (the user) did something I did not or b) it is possible for a user to do something when posting that they have no idea they are doing (ie. clicking “like” somehow). Either way, that’s a pretty significant issue when dozens of people are flocking to the forums looking for a function to remove this seemingly narcissistic, yet accidental, “like,” lest any readers take them to be full of it.
