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70 Chapter 2 Understanding and conceptualizing int eraction

this I mean a human dialog not in the sense of using
ordinary language, but in the sense of thinking about
the sequence and the flow of interaction. So I think
interaction design is about designing a space for peo-
ple, where that space has to have a temporal flow. It
has to have a dialog with the person.
YR: Could you tell me a bit more about what you
think is involved in interaction design?
TW: One of the biggest influences is product design.
I think that interaction design overlaps with it, be-
ticles on hat topic. His book, Bringing Design to Sofhvare,
cause they both take a very strong user-oriented view.
brings together the perspectives of a number of leading re- Both are concerned with finding a user group, under-
searchers and designers. See Color Plate 2 for an example of
his latest research. standing their needs, then using that understanding to
come up with new ideas. They may be ones that the
YR: Tell me about your background and how you users don't even realize they need. It is then a matter
moved into interaction design. of trying to translate who it is, what they are doing,
and why they are doing it into possible innovations.
TW: I got into interaction design through a couple of
In the case of product design it is products. In the case
intermediate steps. I started out doing research into
of interaction design it is the way that the computer
artificial intelligence. I became interested in how peo-
system interacts with the person.
ple interact with computers, in particular, when using
ordinary language. It became clear after years of
YR. What do you think are important inputs into the
working on that, however, that the computer was a
design process?
long way off from matching human abilities. More-
over, using natural language with a computer when it TW: One of the characteristics of design fields as op-
doesn't really understand you can be very frustrating posed to traditional engineering fields is that there is
and in fact a very bad way to interact with it. So, much more dependence on case studies and examples
rather than trying to get the computer to imitate the than on formulas. Whereas an engineer knows how to
person, I became interested in other ways of taking calculate something, an architect or a designer is
advantage of what the computer can do well and what working in a tradition where there is a history over
the person can do well. That led me into the general time of other things people have done. People have
field of HCI. As I began to look at what was going on said that the secret of great design is to know what to
in that field and to study it, it became clear that it was steal and to know when some element or some way of
not the same as other areas of computer science. The doing things that worked before will be appropriate
key issues were about how the technology fits with to your setting and then adapt it. Of course you can't
what people could do and what they wanted to do. In apply it directly, so I think a big part of doing good
contrast, most of computer science is really domi- design is experience and exposure. You have to have
nated by how the mechanisms operate. seen a lot of things in practice and understood what is
I was very attracted to thinking more in the style good and bad about them, to then use these to inform
of design disciplines, like product design, urban de- your design.
sign, architecture, and so on. I realized that there was
an approach that you might call a design way, that YR: How do you see the relationship between study-
puts the technical asspects into the background with ing interaction design and the practice of it? Is there a
respect to understanding the interaction. Through good dialog between research and practice?
looking at these design disciplines, I realized that TW: Academic study of interaction design is a tricky
there was something unique about interaction design, area because so much of it depends on a kind of
which is that it has a dialogic temporal element. By tacit knowledge that comes through experience and