IxD: ?

Interaction Design: everyone has been asking me to explain what interaction design is since I applied to this masters program. I was super sick of answering this question by June; I don’t even really know what to tell people. Have they heard of UX? No? If it’s my Lyft driver asking and I’m tired, I might just say it’s designing websites and products and things.

If it’s someone I actually care about who is asking, and I want them to know what I do, I explain: everything people do is an interaction. We interact with our phones, with websites, with cars, with traffic, with businesses, with spaces, with our system of government. All of this can be designed. Interaction design is trying to make a good experience in that interface between people and all these other things.

In the last few weeks, though, I’ve stopped wanting to say IxD is making those interactions better or easier or frictionless or any of those buzzy words. I think some interactions should be harder, should cost us time and energy. Sometimes, we should have to slow down, and we should have to think about where a product comes from, or what it costs us, or what it costs those around us.
I don’t love the idea of social engineering, because who should be the arbiter of what is good and bad? So I’m not sure anyone should be deciding which interactions should be harder, slower, less efficient; the tangled nature of everything and how our world affects us humans and our moldable little brains is too complex anyway. Want everyone to spend less time on their phones? We’ll probably find something else destructive to do.

So maybe, for now, the answer (for me) is just to design to people’s needs, as benefit our ecosystem (eco meaning whole, not just the ecosystem in terms of rivers, forests, furry animals, etc). Do we need to stop crashing into each other on city sidewalks because we’re too absorbed in our phone screens to look up? Perhaps. Do we need online banking to be even easier? Doubtful. Do we need to increase access to healthy food for everyone and make sure everyone has food security? Definitely! Do we need to change our entire economic system to not depend on ever increasing population growth which will definitely cause environmental collapse? Surely! These are the kinds of challenges I want to tackle.