« New job | Main | Odd Spam »
November 19, 2003
Intersections
The Intersections Blog has launched at last at Ivrea, thanks to Molly's hard work there. I was very pleased she asked me to participate during the pre-launch. Although I didn't get around to posting anything, Anne and I traded comments in a few posts.
So far, the Hub is mostly a place where people are posting notes from Ivrea's Foundations of Interaction Design Symposium, and sadly illustrates just how hard it is to make a conference meaningfully useful to those who aren't at it. The content people have been posting from the Symposium is an overwhelming flood of topics, from cognition to memory to emotion. Unfortunately, too many of the posts are just notes taken by an audience member during lectures, and are quite impossible to get one's head around. Hard, abstract topics reduced to some skeletal, often jargony notes.
I applaud the attempt to grapple with the foundations of interaction design. Ivrea is probably in an unique position to tackle the topic. But one of the most interesting posts on the blog so far, Fabio's entry on 'boundary objects', points out just how hard this is. (The elephant in the old blind men and the elephant parable is a "boundary object": a shared thing understood differently by everyone.)
It is quite obvious that [Interaction Design] is a "community of interest" rather than a "community of practice", and that "boundary objects" abound. Usability Specialists, Information Architects, Software and Hardware Engineers, Experience, Graphic and Product Designers are all in one way or another often involved in shaping the dialogue that develops between a person and the tools he/she uses to achieve his/her personal goals, whether communicational in nature or not. Problems are tackled by all of these players from a slightly different perspective, with widely different toolboxes, and some of them will at times claim that "their approach" is the best, or most complete, or best-proven to provide solutions and answers.
What does it get us to try to bring everything involved in thought, behavior, and emotion into the realm of interaction design? This "what's our rightful domain" question has taken the place of the "What is Information Architecture" discussions that periodically swamped the SIG-IA ship back in the day. All too rarely, it isn't done out of a drive to find inspiration or explanation in other disciplines, but an effort to subsume the understanding of them--and responsibility for them--into Interaction Design. In the wrong hands, it smacks of the hubris that Shedroff's accused IAs of having towards other forms of design. In most cases it's merely an endless rathole; the new InteractionDesigners list has already seen it come up, with all the attendant picky defensiveness and "no, I'm right" mode of arguing. On the other hand, maybe I'm just crabby because I'm (happily) much more focussed on the pragmatic practice of UI design at the moment than on big-picture stuff. (I did just learn that my temprament is ESPP/ISFP which tend to be better tat tactics than strategy...)
On a related issue, does it feel to anyone else like there are almost too many foums for these conversations? Activity on marginwalker.org seems to be drying up, for example, even as the Hub is starting up.
Posted by Andrew at November 19, 2003 03:02 PM
Trackback Pings
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Intersections:
» what you feel is what you get [grid::brand] from anti-mega
This is deliberately not thought through. I don't agree with it all. Please argue at length. I've been doing the obvious navel gazing recently of trying to figure out exactly what I do - which recently people have called interaction design. This is the... [Read More]
Tracked on December 1, 2003 02:38 PM
Comments
We can learn a lot from the social sciences - the concept of boundary objects is just one example... Another one (from cognitive science) I never see mentioned is the concept of basic-levelness of categories. You'd think information architects would be interested in that. I've been wanting to write an entry about that for ages :)
Posted by: Peter Van Dijck at November 20, 2003 08:29 AM
Yeah, it certainly does feel like there's one too many venues. Of course, while there is some degree of overlap, each has its own voice and interaction style, and I'm beginning to think that there's a sweet spot (of design, member pool, etc.) that some sites hit, some lose, and some never find.
I've seen great discussion boards (I'm thinking archinect and altsense) "lose it" as the most-articulate members of their audience drifted elsewhere, or offline completely; I've seen others never quite find an audience.
Marginwalker is teetering dangerously close to a point of no return along these lines, but I think we're going to make one last push/redesign effort. Which should be easier now that I'm in one stable place and have consistent high-speed access. I guess we'll see.
Posted by: AG at November 24, 2003 01:24 PM