Interaction and design
Few of our students traveled to Sunnyvale to demonstrate some of their ideas of interaction design. Many students and Professors from six institutes from different parts of the world participated and all made "Gadgets" which are cool! A browser in a cube which can be rotated to access information and the similar ones. Interaction design has been interaction with objects and computers and how to make it efficient, more reliable, more trustworthy, more easy, more intuitive (though it is hard to define what it exactly means), more engaging, more connective, more continuous and more friendly. There lies a million jobs for designers. I have also spent a lot of time trying to make the human computer interaction easier and meaningful to humans. From Small screens, to big screens, to buttons, joysticks, ports, remote controls, keypads, touchscreen, sensor based gestures.....designers are figuring out well how to make it more elegant, more meaningful or easy.
I am turning away for now from object-human interaction to something little more serious. I often find myself interacting with my colleagues in a strange funny way. Many times students interact with me because of a reason and not because of something they wish for. They interact with me because the system says, I am the Prof and they are the students. Here they are not really interacting but rather simply trying to communicate a presence of self as a part of system. Then I wondered do I do the same thing? May be sometimes yes. Do we all force ourselves to talk to each other if we are in a system? Do a system creates interactions of a sort which is thumped on to me? When I want business, I will call the relevant people who get the work done! When I need a official sanction I call the people concerned with the administration and ask them to follow the work. There must be millions who would not have seen the other person during their routine of work like the "call centers". Does a system reduce a possible lively, intense, humane, enlightened possibility of a rich interaction to a mundane operation of a communication. Even the conversations between the beloved have become "one line messages" or a stark " sentence of communication" alone. Remember a rather cold conversation between father and a son or a mother and a daughter......which often do not have ideas of life these days end up becoming a mundane communication.
In a system, people talk to me because they have to! and vice versa!
So how do people talk to each other when they are in situations created by system? Even a family in a sense is a system, just that we have grown ourselves with it....of course with conditioning of all sorts. Look here....when I blog, I simply express towards a screen! I have no idea who reads. Most often I end up talking more to my blog than I can share with few friends or colleagues. What I mean here is that people have a great ability to express their complex and sophisticated feelings which they suppress quite casually (not because they cant) just because they are somewhere a part of system! The idea of "Karma" also suggests us a role of a being.
What interested me is that if I get a chance to design a system, I also design Interactions! Do I ?
I make roles and roles speak a language of their legal work! I make hierarchy, I dictate conversations, I publish the code of conduct, I define the quality of work which has to come out, I define the standard according to the standards developed in the world, I make a system to become a part of it to reduce my abilities of interaction to mere communication to get some work done. Well a strange system !
Is this interaction design? Or is it our funny behavior with gadgets? which are often not rightly designed to even perform simple operations. When ever I have done user testing, It is very obvious to find use problems! It is mostly because of bad design. Well thats the space I guess we are working calling ourselves as Interaction designers....wait there is one more breed who call them selves experience designers .......I always remember P C Sorcar...when I see them! :-)
I am turning away for now from object-human interaction to something little more serious. I often find myself interacting with my colleagues in a strange funny way. Many times students interact with me because of a reason and not because of something they wish for. They interact with me because the system says, I am the Prof and they are the students. Here they are not really interacting but rather simply trying to communicate a presence of self as a part of system. Then I wondered do I do the same thing? May be sometimes yes. Do we all force ourselves to talk to each other if we are in a system? Do a system creates interactions of a sort which is thumped on to me? When I want business, I will call the relevant people who get the work done! When I need a official sanction I call the people concerned with the administration and ask them to follow the work. There must be millions who would not have seen the other person during their routine of work like the "call centers". Does a system reduce a possible lively, intense, humane, enlightened possibility of a rich interaction to a mundane operation of a communication. Even the conversations between the beloved have become "one line messages" or a stark " sentence of communication" alone. Remember a rather cold conversation between father and a son or a mother and a daughter......which often do not have ideas of life these days end up becoming a mundane communication.
In a system, people talk to me because they have to! and vice versa!
So how do people talk to each other when they are in situations created by system? Even a family in a sense is a system, just that we have grown ourselves with it....of course with conditioning of all sorts. Look here....when I blog, I simply express towards a screen! I have no idea who reads. Most often I end up talking more to my blog than I can share with few friends or colleagues. What I mean here is that people have a great ability to express their complex and sophisticated feelings which they suppress quite casually (not because they cant) just because they are somewhere a part of system! The idea of "Karma" also suggests us a role of a being.
What interested me is that if I get a chance to design a system, I also design Interactions! Do I ?
I make roles and roles speak a language of their legal work! I make hierarchy, I dictate conversations, I publish the code of conduct, I define the quality of work which has to come out, I define the standard according to the standards developed in the world, I make a system to become a part of it to reduce my abilities of interaction to mere communication to get some work done. Well a strange system !
Is this interaction design? Or is it our funny behavior with gadgets? which are often not rightly designed to even perform simple operations. When ever I have done user testing, It is very obvious to find use problems! It is mostly because of bad design. Well thats the space I guess we are working calling ourselves as Interaction designers....wait there is one more breed who call them selves experience designers .......I always remember P C Sorcar...when I see them! :-)
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