In design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "about shaping digital things for people’s use", alternately defined as "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main focus is on behavior. What clearly marks interaction design as a design field as opposed to a science or engineering field is that it is synthesis and imagining things as they might be, more so than focusing on how things are.
Interaction design is heavily focused on satisfying the needs and desires of the people who will use the product. Where other disciplines like software engineering have a heavy focus on designing for technical stakeholders of a project.
Read more about Interaction Design: History, The Five Dimensions of Interaction Design, Related Disciplines
Famous quotes containing the words interaction and/or design:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The reason American cars don’t sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That’s why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.”
—Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1938)