Back in February 2001, I attended a design history conference—specifically geared to graphic design history—but at the end, as I wrote up my thoughts on the lectures on my blog I asked the following questions: I find it quite interesting to read these questions now that I teach Interaction Design history some 20+ years later…
– Previously published on Boxes and Arrows, 2002 In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This…
One of the projects I started at ADL and never finished, due to it not being core to the mission of ADL, was the visualization and modeling of systemic racism and technology that continues to support systemic racism. I spent a lot of time reading articles across different fields—healthcare, finance, education, law enforcement etc— and…
Rick Malone: 08/09/1940-01/18/22 I read this at my father’s memorial service, March 17, 2022. Most people in attendance were from his theater family and many of the shared stories were about theater and shows. I am not involved in the the theater so didn’t have that in common with him, but music was one of…
References and Videos plus my next project I hope you enjoyed the intro lectures I shared from my Interaction Design History class I taught this past fall (2020). The lectures barely scratch the surface of a deep, complex and intertwined history of our field. To read some history books, you might think Interaction Design comes…
Alternative ways of thinking about interactive experiences & speculating on the future We are finally into the future — and this week we read about Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, about Robots and thinking about how we design the future. Read through IBM’s Design for AI Framework. They do a great job of explaining the parts —…
We bring ourselves into the present and we contemplate ethics questions after watching contemporary science fiction clips. This week we will look at the rise and spread of mobile interaction design around the world, the beginning of the internet of things which shepherded in voice user experience and we will briefly touch on design systems…
I share screenshots of my first website and we all laughed at how primitive it was This week we are going to ride the dot com boom and bust as the internet becomes a viable place for interaction designers. We’ve already talked about early communities moving from BBSs onto the web and AOL making the…
Where I let others tell you the details on the history of IA and we think about IA in the context of IXD This week we are going to deep dive into Information Architecture. Many interaction designers do information architecture as a practice — after all, much of what we work with is information and…
Maligned AOL and research into gender differences in games In the 80’s, on the east coast, another community was created by Steve Case. AOL started as a BBS and eventually evolved to developing its own proprietary software. Not the web, but not a BBS anymore, AOL grew to be one of the most influential and…
Where Interaction Design History and my personal history as a designer begin to overlap Once folks start having computers in their homes, they want to do more than just create files. They want to connect with and talk with other people. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s software called Bulletin Board systems started appearing. There…
Finally we are going to talk about early personal computing and computer games. This is the beginning of what we are more familiar with compared to what we have talked about up to this point. Early in the days — the 1970’s and 1980’s — of computers and computer programming, lots and lots of people…
The week we learn how architecture in the physical world can teach us about designing in the digital world. And about design patterns. This week we’re going to think about architecting spaces and talk about a couple of people who helped us all think differently about how we can use these concepts in Interaction Design….
We finally start to hear about the origins of Interaction Design as a distinct practice. It still doesn’t have the official name yet but Bill Verplank, talks about the work of doing interaction design. Read about the concepts for the Personal Dynamic Media — Dynabook — concept put forward by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg…
This is a short intro as the content of the videos covers everything needed to think about in this section. So far in our journey we’ve seen the evolution of symbols and pictographs into our current alphabets, as well as the birth of printing, type design and graphic design. We’ve explored the rise of industrial…