Thoughts on Interaction Design

I'm still muddling through permissions for the book, but I'm starting to get a bit of a response. Some responses have been great - for example, O'Reilly responded with a signed permissions form via email within two days. Some responses are not great; University of California Press wants $48 to use eleven words. I'm finding out copyright can be a big business. Copyright.com allows companies to register their text online and then automatically charge people to use excerpts; this strikes me like a case of making money "because we can", not because it makes any sense at all. The repercussions are soundly un-academic, as I will most likely choose to remove the quote rather than foot fifty bucks to add structure to my argument.

There is, of course, humor even in Copyright. I asked Philips if I could use an excerpt from one of their products; they wrote back:

Thank you for your email to Philips Customer Care. We understand that you need to have the hard copy of the owner's manual of your unit.

Let's hear it for automation.

There are a number of new texts coming out about Interaction Design. I don't know if they are good or bad, but there sure are a number of them!

Dan Saffer, another CMU alumni, has written a text called Designing for Interaction; this seems to provide a little about a lot, but certainly serves as a starting point for those who are new to the field. It also has a very colorful cover.

It looks like Jenny Preece is about to introduce a new version of Interaction Design, but I was disappointed by the tagline “beyond human-computer interaction” on the previous version, as the text seemed happily grounded in HCI theory. I wasn't the only one to notice this, either. Perhaps this version will delve beyond the historical safety of HCI.

Due out in a month is a title called “Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design”, which looks to be an interesting take on drawing connections between diverse disciplines in the attempt to understand behavior. I don't know who Brendan Dawes is, but Amazon says he is a "legendary interactivity designer".

Gillian Crampton Smith released a pretty compelling title called “Theories and Practice in Interaction Design”, but after paying for my ISBN numbers, I can’t afford the $80 price tag.

And, in no particular order, there is also Observing Interaction: Second Edition, A Theory of Computer Semiotics, Sexual Interactions: The Social Construction of Atypical Sexual Behaviors, and The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (A 744 page book on how to write Personas? $60? What?)

With all of that said, there still seems to be a very large hole in the space of design theory – there are a lot of “how to” books, but not very many “why” or “should we really?” books coming out. (This may indicate that no one wants to read them; if that's the case, I guess all of my relatives are getting Interaction Design books for the holidays). Stolterman & Lowgren’s text is almost two years old, but it was really the last text that touched on some of the language-style issues I’ve written about. I hope that is the place my text will live. Maybe someone will even buy it.

In preparing to publish this book, I’ve been doing a lot of research on the state of the printing and publishing industry. Like other industries, traditional business models are being wildly disrupted; while publishing seems to have escaped the scope of the original internet boom and bust, the second wave is making a direct impact on the way books traditionally come to fruition. The major players seem to have leveled out a bit, although some are clearly more evolved than others.

Lulu offers self-publishing of materials at a relatively low cost; while the quality seems to be hit or miss, this seems like an obvious choice for publishers of text-only material. The prices are a bit more than what Fidlar Doubleday might offer, but without the volume-necessity. For example, a 6x9 book of 196 pages in perfect binding would run $4.53 (binding) + ($0.02 (page) * 196) = $8.45; Fidlar could probably deliver this same size text for $5.00, but with a minimum purchase of 1000 copies. Color is out of the question, as Lulu charges fifteen cents per color page – but doesn’t allow you to print single pages in color (thus, the 196 page book just climbed to $33.93 – eek!). Fidlar would charge an insert-fee for color printing, of close to a dollar per page.

Lightning Source might be the bastard-child of on-demand printing; the site is ugly, the prices seem inflated, and the buzz about the service is really quite poor. I didn’t get much farther than the homepage, as the site looks like it was made in Frontpage by someone’s son. The benefit of Lightning Source, however, is that printing with them puts titles instantly into Amazon’s online catalog. I suppose if one had a mass-marketable book, that would be a good place to be; I don’t imagine it matters much with my own text if it is in Amazon Proper or Amazon Marketplace, so I’m not concerned with that.

Blurb offers self-publishing for individual texts. I just purchased a book that commemorates the life of my cat; the book is 77 pages of full color imagery, at 10x8. They sell each copy for $34.95, making this infeasible for large-scale publication but certainly an appropriate choice for memories and small-runs. I was blown away by the quality of the color printing; while the text itself seemed to roll a bit (creating a bit of a blur on several pages), the color was sharp, crystal clear and vivid. The layout software is a bit of a bear, but I muddled through it; I don’t know how usable it would be for folks who aren’t familiar with existing layout tools, but I’ve also seen Blurb advertising for an interaction designer, so they seem to be on the right track.

In the end, for me, having a small printer do the work makes the most sense. I can get two color throughout the text, have a more immediate control of the quality of the work, and reprint as necessary. This requires a bit more moneyup front, but I’m of the opinion: what else am I going to spend my hard-earned money on? I love books; why not buy 1000 of them?

Because I have a hard time staying focused on The Task At Hand (which is really editing all hell out of this manuscript), I started doing some preliminary research on payment systems for eCommerce sites. The last time I did something like this was back in 2001, and the choices were pretty limited; you could work with Vignette, Trilogy, and other enterprise providers and pay a million bucks to get something that most likely didn’t work. The state of plug-and-go payment systems has much evolved, and even has some silly 2.0 players (although I’m not sure why I need AJAX in my Buy Now! Button).

This forum lists a ton of processing/purchasing solutions.

It looks like the worst option for me is to set up a merchant account with my bank, Bank Of America, and then fold that system into an online presence. BoA will charge me $150 to set up the account, $20 per month, and ten cents a transaction. That’s obviously ridiculous, so I did a bit of research on how to get away from big banking.

Shopify offers me a “shop in minutes, a business for life”. That sounds pretty good, but once you start to poke around, you realize that they really give you a “shopping cart in minutes, the ability to integrate your inflated-cost BoA account in weeks, and a business that has fancy AJAX enabled components for life”. I’m actually sort of at a loss in trying to understand what it is Shopify does, exactly; while they certainly have a "feature-rich" interface, in order to enable Visa, MasterCard and AmEx purchases, you need the aforementioned Merchant Account from BoA. I guess Shopify just gives me a basic online purchasing template and shopping cart functionality, and then takes 3% of my profits.

Big Cartel seems to realize that its competitors (ie, Shopify) have lost sight of reality, and says things like “By leaving out all the complicated crap that makes other services so frustrating to use, we've made it ever so easy to get your store up and running and looking great in no time”. They seem to have the same base-set of functionality as Shopify, but the site seems a hell of a lot more usable, useful and desirable. They offer the majority of their payment processing through Paypal, which led me to …

Paypal. I was under the impression that they would require users to pay with a Paypal account, but I was wrong. Paypal has added the ability for merchants to integrate Visa, et al easily onto a site. Users are redirected to Paypal for one screen - the purchasing experience - and are then pushed back into the normal flow of the referring site. Once I registered as a merchant and found Website Payments Standard, I was delighted to see scenarios of use illustrating the ability to integrate purchases:

Scenario 1. I already have a shopping cart.
Scenario 2. I need a shopping cart.
Scenario 3. I want to sell one item at a time.

Let’s hear it for solid interaction design!

Paypal takes 3% of my profits, but doesn’t require the merchant account from the bank; they’ll handle the book-keeping, allow me to print mailing labels, determine tax, and all that jazz. It looks like Paypal is the way to go for a small, one-item shop such as mine.

I have been fairly pessimistic (yeah, it's in my nature) about the permission slips for quotes; I didn't imagine anyone would actually read the letter, much less take the time to respond, much less take the time to respond positively. However, the signed slips are "flooding" in at a rate of a few per day; I received one from IBM, Duckworth, Springer, and Guardian in the past few days. By far, the most interesting has been from Jason Walsh, a freelance writer for guardian.co.uk. I'm quoting from Jason's interview with Jef Raskin, and through email, Jason pointed me at another online site he is writing for called Digit. I was so intrigued with his writing style that I read through each of his previous entries on the site; I was particularly enthused by his post "Design Like You Don't Give A Damn", as his short rant seems to summarize a lot of what I've been thinking about with "public service design" or "societal design".

In addition to "meeting interesting people", I've also had continually reinforced upon me the nature of "fair use" - most everyone who is agreeing to my use of quotes has also mentioned that their permission is probably unnecessary, and that my use falls under "fair use". This is good, I think, but I still don't feel comfortable enough crap-shooting with the rest of the quotes; if they aren't accepted by a certain date, I'll have to remove them.

I received another signed permission form today, this one from Jodi Forlizzi at CMU. Jodi was one of my professors the last year I was at Carnegie, and she’s also one of the few people actively writing about and thinking about the linguistic connections between design and interaction (and the relationships between these and experiences). I quote in the book from the paper Taxonomy for Extracting Design Knowledge from Research Conducted During Design Cases, written by Jodi, Shelly Evenson and John Zimmerman; the paper does an excellent job of articulating the design process in core phases with a cohesive mapping of deliverables, or output, from each phase.

I think it is interesting to see how specific schools shape large bodies of knowledge over time; CMU is creating a world of Interaction Design knowledge that investigates process, experience, and language. You can see the ripples of this world – starting with Richard Buchanan’s work, which is obviously inspired by the thoughts of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - extend outwards as people like Uday Gajendar, Dan Saffer, Jodi and myself write and think about the intersection of these issues. This seems to be a parallel to the sort of form-language-discussion that went on at Pratt with Rowena Reed Kostello, inspired by Peter Behrens and passed on to Craig Vogel; and similar also to the innovation-society-design world of Jay Doblin and Buckminster Fuller, which so clearly impacts the work of Larry Keeley.

I like the idea of contributing an idea, even if it turns out to be a bad or incomplete idea – to a larger force of knowledge. This seems to articulate the essence of all I’ve learned from the few mentors I had growing up; working isn’t about ego, or lack of ego – work is about creating something and forever adding to the forward force of progress.

I spent much of the day filing and following up on permissions requests. I spoke to a very nice woman named Florence at Penguin who assured me that my requests were probably within the realm of fair use, but if I could fax the original pages in, she would get them verified by the permissions people.

I also spent nearly an hour attempting to track down the proper publisher for a quote from Don Norman; ultimately, I sent a message directly to him and, after a brief email exchange, he personally granted me permission to use the specific quote from Emotional Design. In hindsight, this obvious technique seems like the best bet for future projects - contact the author directly, and avoid the strange layered system of publishers and publishing companies.

The quote from Norman, and my surrounding text, deals with the connections between storytelling, narrative and design. I'm specifically interested in the types of interactions that resonate in a larger and more substantial manner:

One way of examining and considering this level of substance is through a linguistic lens of poetry. An interaction occurs in the conceptual space between a person and an object. It is at once physical, cognitive and social. A poetic interaction is one that resonates immediately but yet continues to inform later – it is one that causes reflection, and one that relies heavily on a state of emotional awareness. Additionally, a poetic interaction is one that is nearly always subtle, yet mindful.

Consider the poetic and highly refined act of chopping a clove of garlic with a Wüsthof cook’s knife – and compare it to the obvious, jarring experience of riding a roller coaster through the most perilous curves. The roller coaster drops and turns, and relies on the adrenalin rush associated with near death. It creates an experience so riddled with awe that many will stop “thinking” at all. Each turn and drop is bigger than the last, and as riders feel the wind in their hair and the blood in their ears, the exhilaration is one that is sensory and perceptual first and cognitive second, if ever.

By comparison, preparing a meal can be a rather banal experience. Imagine using the heavy forged steel Wüsthof, the cold metal against your hand, the staccato and constant motion of the blade against the cutting board and the pungent odor of garlic pressing against your eyes and nose. This mundane experience described is a story, which creates, much like a compelling novel, a world for the participant to engage in. Unlike a novel, however, the participant is not an idle observer. The active engagement of the senses encourages a highly heightened sense of awareness - the “user” is not simply a “viewer.”

The roller-coaster forces a set of behavior through brute force, and reminds the rider over and over that they are, in fact, thrilled. The knife, by comparison, speaks quietly but firmly. The interaction is at once less obvious and more compelling. The entertainment provided by the roller-coaster is passive in the most obvious sense – a rider sits, and their senses are assaulted. The “entertainment” provided by the knife is highly active, demanding a sense of acute engagement.

A poetic interaction can generally be characterized as having, or encouraging, three main elements: honesty, mindfulness, and a vivid and refined attention to sensory detail. These elements combine to encourage creativity in the end participant (note the shift away from the word user, as the audience no longer simply uses but instead must actively engage).

The text is now going through a final set of grammar, spelling and sentence structure errors. According to my editor, I have picked up a poor habit of using too many semicolons; I seem to recall Ayn Rand having the same “problem” – perhaps this is where I actually picked it up, considering the large amount of her writing I’ve absorbed – and I’m not sure I agree that it is, in fact, a problem. In his short article The Power of Punctuation, Martin Solomon discusses how “punctuation marks have tonal value, just as letter forms do; they also have mass and energy”. I find the semicolon to have a sort of academic ease or fluidness to it, and the pause it generates is more subtle, lasting and resonate than a simple comma or a period.

When reading a poem, it is interesting to consider where the imagery comes from. The words on the page are rather plain, and save for the authors’ potential use of kitschy typography, the print itself is rather nondescript. Words themselves frequently fail to trigger vivid and robust thoughts, as the brain seems to desire to think in two dimensions. That is, even when trying passionately to picture a “tree in the rain”, few readers will get beyond the prototypical form of a tree – the form that, perhaps, a child will scrawl when asked to draw said object. This lack of ability to visualize an object in full detail in the mind may be what holds many back from claiming artistic capabilities. “I can’t draw” usually means “I can’t draw accurately”, and it may be more appropriate to claim “I can’t think” (or at least “I can’t think accurately”).

But compare the imagery conjured by a “tree in the rain”, to this short excerpt:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

T. S. Eliot has managed to use the same basic constructs of words, and simple words at that, to stir deep emotional responses in the reader. A “tree in the rain” is finite, obvious, and non-challenging. The lack of complexity and specificity may, in fact, be why it is difficult to picture the tree with any depth or detail. But the fact that the lilac has dead roots, and it isn’t just a rain – it’s a spring rain, creates a matter-of-fact situation that readers can begin to feel, before they even try to see it. It is difficult to picture April, much less to picture the month as cruel, yet Eliot’s four lines have managed to invigorate a deeply-honed sense of feeling that allows readers to picture not just a tree, nor a rain, but an entire scene.