Posts by Micky Fang

Ethics

In my opinion, interaction designers have a critical ethical duty to ensure their work with AI prioritizes user well-being, trust, and fairness. The responsibility includes

  1. Transparency: Clearly explain AI capabilities, limitations, and decision-making processes to users.
  2. Privacy: Safeguard user data, ensure informed consent, and minimize data collection.
  3. Bias Mitigation: Proactively identify and reduce biases in AI models to ensure fairness across all user demographics.
  4. Autonomy: Design systems that empower users with control over AI interactions and avoid manipulative tactics.
  5. Accessibility: Ensure AI-driven interfaces are inclusive and usable for diverse populations, including those with disabilities.
  6. Accountability: Anticipate potential misuse and design safeguards to protect users from harm.
  7. Sustainability: Assess the long-term societal and environmental impact of AI integration

Pace Layers

Pace Layers, a concept from Stewart Brand, describe how systems evolve at different speeds, influencing interaction design’s lifecycle. Fast-changing layers, like technology and fashion, drive frequent iterations in design trends, tools, and user expectations. Medium-paced layers, such as governance and infrastructure, shape usability standards and accessibility compliance, impacting long-term design strategies. Slow layers, like culture and nature, provide a stable foundation, influencing timeless design principles like inclusivity and ethical considerations. Interaction design work must align with these layers, balancing agility in adapting to fast changes while maintaining consistency and foresight to address slower, enduring societal and environmental shifts.

iPod – iPhone etc.

The iPod and iPhone transformed our relationship with technology by making it personal, portable, and intuitive. These devices combined innovative, convenient design with functionality, introducing technology in ways that had never been seen before.

When Apple introduced touch-based interfaces, eliminating barriers to entry and creating a seamless interaction model. This has influenced interaction design ever since by prioritizing user-centric experiences, emphasizing simplicity, accessibility, and engagement. The apps on these products became more personalized, offering features that easily integrate into daily routines, such as exercising or setting alarms. This shift led interaction design to focus more on user experience by creating better responsive interfaces, fostering emotional connections through features, and raising user expectations.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 required interactive features like real-time communication (via AJAX), user-generated content (e.g., blogs, social media posts), and dynamic page updates. Tools like APIs, RSS feeds, and collaborative platforms (e.g., wikis) allowed users to create, share, and engage with content easily. Interactivity through comments, tagging, and likes transformed static websites into participatory ecosystems.

Today, interactions emphasize decentralization, personalization, and immersion. Blockchain enables secure peer-to-peer transactions, AI curates content intelligently, and AR/VR provides immersive experiences. The focus has shifted from user participation to ownership (via NFTs, Web3 wallets) and seamless integration of the physical and digital worlds.

Design Patterns

The use of design systems and interaction design patterns can streamline design processes and enhance consistency, but they do not inherently stifle creativity. Instead, they found a new way which is by establishing a framework for efficiency, allowing designers to focus on solving complex problems rather than creating new basics. By standardizing repetitive elements, such systems free up cognitive resources for exploring innovative features, storytelling, and unique user experiences.

However, over-reliance on rigid patterns can lead to generic designs and inhibit experimentation. To maintain creativity, designers should view design systems as tools rather than constraints, adapting them thoughtfully to context and user needs. Creativity thrives when designers balance structure with flexibility, ensuring that functional patterns enhance, rather than limit, originality in interaction design.

Web to User Experience

The transition from Web Design to User Experience (UX) Design arose as digital technology and user needs evolved.

Early web design focused on aesthetics and functions, but increasing complexity in digital products required attention to usability and user journeys. When smart phones and more convenient product was invented, web design had to upgrade as well. With the technology rising, function and aesthetics was built based on a product, web design are included in these features. Web design no longer needs to built functions and aesthetics, these things upgrades with the technology growth. What they can focus on is the people who use it. Better user experience can allow users get to their approach easier and faster, by claiming datas and doing research, adding human -based component to the design.

Internet & Government

By Micky Fang

New technology thrives when governments, corporations, and open-source communities collaborate. Government funding is crucial for high-risk, foundational research without immediate commercial value, as seen in the early internet. Corporations, with substantial resources, can scale and refine innovations, making them accessible. Open-source ventures, meanwhile, drive transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven progress, ensuring that technologies serve broader social interests. Ideally, governments fund foundational research, corporations develop it for the market, and open-source projects keep it open, transparent, and adaptable. By leveraging the strengths of all three sectors, we ensure that technological progress serves both society and economic growth.

Lucy Suchman


Lucy Suchman revolutionized our understanding of human-technology interaction by emphasizing that technology’s effectiveness depends on real-world, context-specific use rather than pre-defined tasks. Her work, especially in Plans and Situated Actions, showed that human behavior is adaptive and unpredictable, challenging designers to focus on user contexts rather than fixed routines. Suchman’s insights led to more flexible, user-centered design approaches, underscoring that successful technology must account for human variability and the complexities of everyday environments.

GUI and Personal Computer


In the early Macintosh and Windows days, GUIs are evolved with richer graphics and systems, there are touch and voice controls, and more smooth multitasking function. When ages change, the whole environment are kind of relying on GUI functions, there are more people concerned and payed attention about the improvement of GUIs. When core elements like icons, menus, and windows have persisted. There are improvements also needed such as better accessibility, more flexible touch screen, more intuitive navigation across devices, also some AI function that might simplify personal tasks. 

The importance of Douglas Engelbart and the team at SRI

The importance of Douglas Engelbart and the team at SRI is very significant, Douglas is given the name “The mother of all demos”. In that time people are lack of design and ideas, with the mother of all demos, he can generate ideas from his mind and do designs that move the technology progress.

Douglas invented the mouse, which is a great invention that let human and computer interact more deeply. it is considered to be a revolutionary evolution that influenced and pushed future technology development.

Douglas shape the future of personal computing and the way humans interact with computers. He found many concept and create inventions that still influence now the way people interact with computer and technology.

Fei Fei Li’s AI Journey Response

AI, as in Artificial intelligence, a powerful and knowledgeable tool, when you give an artificial intelligence a command, it will give you an answer in a few seconds that would take you a lot of time to obtain. This may seem a little bit scary, the fact that AI will replace human being in many jobs have been overly spread between people.

In the video, Fei Fei Li talked a lot of information and what she think about Artificial intelligence, I highly agree with her point on the statement, AI would not replace human being, she strongly advocates for AI that complements and augments human capabilities rather than replaces them. AI is a great inventory or an discovery, it will make life easier for human being, but for now it should serve what men thinks and that human values must guide its development.

She thinks that AI should not be an competitor to humans, and people must not fear the rise of the AI. People should be seeing it as a useful tool, and erase the concerns about losing our jobs. She argues that AI’s development should be inclusive and diverse, with diverse stakeholders involved in shaping its future.

Me myself tired many times using the AI, for example like ChatGPT, I was really amaze by the capability it can do, and I think with an AI, I can do much more things faster and more accurate, but in top of that, I was the one that is giving it idea and concepts, more like a boss to an employee. AI served me good, and I also think artificial intelligence will make people life more easier instead of replacing human’s life. We add meaning to a tool, not let the tool lead us.