Interaction design; dispatches from Tokyo

This post will be the first of several by Eriko Matsumura dealing with the field of interaction design, mainly in Japan.

To give a brief introduction on the origins of this field; Interaction design grew as an extension to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and emerged as a discipline in the 1980’s when computer technology started to be used in everyday objects, from washing machines to cars, giving them a level of interactivity not seen before. Today microchip technology exists in almost every household device we use, Interaction Designers are now employed in increasingly diverse markets and practices such as product design, mechanical engineering, marketing, and service design.

Today, technologists are under pressure to follow a ‘human-centered design process’ and this has greatly increased the demand for Interaction Design.

Japan, despite being a long time world leader in the development of electronic products and services, has not adapted the name or categorisation ‘Interaction Design‘ as has happened in Europe or America. One of the key reasons is that the education institutions have not started using the categorisation of Interaction Design, but have continued to use the already established fields. However interaction design is highly developed and integrated in the design industry here in Japan where electronic product and service experience is seamlessly integrated in our everyday life. Interaction design does seem to pop up more and more as a buzz word in both education and industry.

This was not supposed to be a run down of the history of interaction design, so I’d like to continue by jumping several milestones ahead in it’s development history and describe some current trends related to how people use products and services, and in turn show how this has shaped how interaction designers work.

Today it is rather difficult to design good and long lasting digital media products and services because the technology and the people using it are changing rapidly. Most users of digital technologies understand and appreciate the richness of digital language; from static text, icons and images to sound and dynamic interactive content and applications. Consumers want a quality experience; usable, engaging, mobile and mostly for free. That’s why it takes a multi-skilled team to develop great customer experience from branding and marketing (to position the product in the market) through to user researchers (to tease out requirements and expectations) and technologists (to craft great technology).

The one-liner

One of the reasons for the emergence of the interaction design discipline is the increasing complexity of problems. People are no longer interested in how technology works but rather what it does for them and how it fits neatly into their own lifestyle. As technology is becoming more sophisticated and complex, people have only a vague idea of how computer technology works. Designers of services are increasingly aware that people must be able to understand at a glance, not how it works but what the design can do for them in their life. One of the most powerful marketing tools in the internet age is the word-of-mouth method, meaning that products which can be explained simply in one or two sentences have got a good chance of being adopted and used by people.

A good example of this is Skype – a service which is easily explained so that people immediately understand its value proposition – ‘you can call to anywhere in the world for free‘. Or Youtube; ‘you can watch other people’s videos or share your own videos with anyone anywhere in the world‘. Designing services which are as simple as this to understand and use requires a surprising amount of thinking, exploring, and development before you have got it right. Good interaction design is at the core of this trend.

Direct Manipulation

Another trend which has come about since the iPhone is the experience of ‘direct manipulation‘. In the past twenty years interactions with technological devices has been based on two layers. The first layer is some kind of sensor (for example a mouse or a keyboard) and the second layer is an actuator (for example a computer screen or a digital display of some sort). Since the birth of the iPhone and later the Android phone and various other smart phones, these two layers have merged into one – the touch screen display. This development has enabled a more direct mode of manipulation of screen content that will continue to evolve.

Service Design

When you look beyond the physical design, the interface, computer hardware and the networks they operate, you end up looking at a service. Services are intangible products better explained as systems consisting of objects, people, networks, and brands. Unlike interfaces, interactions with services occur over time. The design of services is not a new thing, on the contrary, services have been around for hundreds of years but what is new is the interconnectedness of such systems which will continue to evolve. Cloud computing is a good example of where the interface or device is merely a point of access to your data that now exists in ‘the cloud’, and can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

In my forthcoming posts I look forward to following up on these trends and other exciting things happening in the field of interaction design here in Japan and elsewhere in the world.