Sunday, March 04, 2007

Particapating interaction?


What the hell is "interaciton"? To get this question clear enough, here I have an extreme personal definition of interaction: unfinished design. A work is not complete yet without the user's full participation. "HIt it", for example, a chair design by Marign van der Poll and produced by Droog, is not a practicalbe chair until the user's final devotion: smashing it with a hammer, which comes with the chair, to determine his prospective form. The result is customized and potential to be kept changing along time. The video below shoes the process of accomplishing "Hit it":

To make things much simpler, let's say that those works which just wait there for people moving closer to operate some unfriednly interface without either narrative or emotional motive are not eligible for being called "interactive design". A successful interactive design should possess some features which can evoke participants' certain experience that make them react both emotionally and physically. From this point, an interaction designer cannot only focus on design itself. The background and research behind all human activities seem more and more important than the form of the design. It is the sequence of events that happen between users and objects that give the design meaning of interaction. It reminds me of an interesting news of RCA, the program Interaction Design just changed the name to "Design Interactions". It's not just reversing two words but indicates and pulls out the importance of interaction in design field which has been misunderstood for a while. Think about it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home