Interaction design – practice of designing interactive digital systems

Interaction design is the practice of designing interactive digital systems, electronic products, technological environments, and sophisticated services. Like many other design disciplines, interaction design is strongly concerned with the form of electronic machineries and gadgets. However, interaction design focuses on design of the behavior, unlike the other traditional design disciplines.

Interaction design affects human behavior and its relation with the device been used. For instance, architectural setup is concerned with how people use physical space of devices and gadgets. Therefore, graphic designs often attempt to motivate or facilitate a response through interactive design.

To understand the implication of interaction design, take something as basic as a refrigerator. Before the emergence of modern science, the maneuver of refrigerator was quite simple; turning a single bulge did the work. There was one position for off, and one position to on and control the temperature. The refrigerator obeyed the orders according to the activities on the knob. To the designers and makers, this process is called behavior. Now, if you focus on the behavior, you will realize, that was certainly quite a simple and mechanistic behavior. In present circumstances, there are a lot of buttons and knobs build-in a refrigerator. Pressing the buttons means, the system goes through a lot of actions before carrying out the orders. This is actually called a complex behavior. Throughout the history of modern science, complex behavior took its stand in all the electronic devices. Work of Interaction design is to make the complex behavior look simple. With its unique methods and practices, interaction designs allow the users to understand and implement the complex behaviors into simple terms.

Interaction design is very much a design discipline, quite different from science and engineering. While science and engineering creates electronic devices and digital products; interaction designs make the process simple for the users.