While “interaction design” may itself be a newer term, its roots run deep, tangling with various other disciplines along the way. As such, we can’t hope to fully understand it (nor our own design practices) without tracing each connection to its origin. A quote about Leonardo Da Vinci encapsulates this idea very well: “…he painted it, he investigated it, and he built things to better interact and explore it.” A good design practice is holistic, involving some amount of research, craft, and yes, artistry, to consistently meet user needs and provide them a positive experience. The Renaissance in general—with its cross-pollination of science, art, and literature, as well as a widespread dedication to what we might nowadays call iteration—is a valuable piece of the puzzle. Just look at anthropometrics (the study and measurement of the human body’s physical properties), which was widely-explored during this period and now plays a vital role in both industrial and computer design.
There’s lots of value to be found in the history of type as well. While it’s no secret that visual design—specifically fonts and iconography—involves things like metaphor, symbolism, and sociocultural associations, oftentimes we underestimate its incredibly flexible nature. We ask ourselves questions like “does this icon need a label?” when both the icon and the label are representations that can be perceived in different ways. The former is akin to a pictograph: a picture that communicates an idea (e.g., how an icon of a house = the homepage on a mobile device). The latter is more abstract—line forms that communicate sounds rather than ideas, combining to form their meaning. However, ask anyone in the Western hemisphere and they’d likely say that words are less abstract than icons. Why is that? Isn’t the meaning of a word twice removed (an idea that is communicated through a word, which is itself communicated through letters, which themselves hold sounds) whereas the meaning of a picture is almost instantaneous, even if that meaning varies from person to person?
It is, I think, a matter of opinion. After all, there’s no denying that with the invention of lead movable type, and later, the steam-powered printing press, words have attained some level of accessibility (and in turn, consistency of meaning). Either way, I firmly believe that this is why content design—a field even newer than interaction design—is important. We’re so surrounded by letters and words these days that we forget that they are not concrete things; they can’t pin down our every idea as neatly as we think they can. That icon label you’re puzzling over may change the meaning of the icon, not clarify it—you’d need an in-depth knowledge of words to recognize the difference. And it is that understanding, along with a plethora of others to be explored later in this class, that makes a designer successful.
