MIT Media Lab: Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge (IDEO) March 8, 2007

Interactive technology is everywhere, seeping into every crack and cranny of our lives. It’s not just the mouse that we use for pointing and clicking, plus the desktop and windows on our screens—it’s the TV we watch, the iPods that help us enjoy music, video games, digital cameras, phone services, Palmtops, search engines like Google, and on and on. That’s why Moggridge wrote Designing Interactions, interviewing forty influential designers who have created this new technology. He shows that there are interaction designers behind the technologies of our time, and that our interaction with them has been carefully studied and designed.

The words "people" and "prototypes" sum up the process of interaction design. We can identify design opportunities by discovering people’s latent needs, behaviors, and desires, and by creating new ways to serve and support them. We can visualize new products, services, spaces, media and software-based interactions, and bring them to life by prototyping. It is worth prototyping early and often, making each iterative step a little more realistic. At some point we are likely to experience that wonderful "Ah Ha!" feeling that comes with a creative leap, but that is only an indication that we have moved forward in the detail of the aspect of the design that we are focusing on. We will only know that the design is good when we have taken it to the people who will use it, and found that they are pleased, excited, motivated, and satisfied with the result.

Official Website: http://www.media.mit.edu/events/eventpage.php?event=talk-382