–Engage

I’m really excited about my latest article on Boxes & Arrows entitled “Foundations of Interaction Design”. It’s been a long time coming and I really appreciate the patiences of Chris Baum who personally held my hand through the editing process.

Check out the article and contribute a comment or two on B&A.

The crux of the article is to try to talk about elements that set up the foundation of interaction design as a discipline that differentiate it from the form based design disciplines that cooperate with interaction design towards creating a complete user experience.

The four elements are:
Time – this actually breaks down a bit more into sub-elements because as we know time is relative.
Metaphor – interaction design is narrative design and you can’t really have a descent narrative without metaphor. I mean Willy taught us that.
Abstraction – this relates to the physical movement of the user vs. the way that movement is abstracted or represented through the digital interfaces we design
Negative Space – every design discipline has an absence of something. What does it mean to “lack” in interaction?

Well enjoy the article!!!

David Ngo tells us why we need to know what design is and what design is in this very funny video called “Design Session 01″.

The pieces I liked about it:
1. How do you promote that your work ads value if you can’t even tell people what you do?
2. Breaking away from design as making forms beautiful
3. Focusing design on process

Thanx David!!!

If you live in NYC (or the commutable metro area) you might be interested in taking a class I’m teaching, “Interaction Design of Web Applications”. The course is through the SmartExperience.org project of Victor Lombardi’s.

I’m really excited to be one of the first courses with this amazing project where students and teachers come together and create educational opportunities.

The course is a new and expanded take on the UI Conf and Web Application Summit workshops I’ve done for User Interface Engineering (UIE) and the 1/2 day workshop I did at the Information Architecture Summit. But this time there is more time (12 hours!!!) So we will have more time to get our hands dirty and really dig deep into giving you the tools and theoretical background to apply right away in your day-to-day design world.

So come on to SmartExperience’s web site and register for the course.

First class is September 5th!!!!!

I hope to see you there!