The history of interaction design is a tangled web of other disciplines—human factors, industrial design, psychology, sociology, human-computer interaction coming out of computer science, graphic design, instructional design, technical writing, animation, engineering efficiency and other technical and artistic backgrounds.
This course will touch on multiple aspects of these backgrounds to help tell the story of how interaction design has evolved, often in parallel to technical advances in computers and the internet.
I wrote in last year’s opening post:
“While my intent is to cover the major milestones, I am over-emphasizing the voices of women to counter the ubiquitousness of the myth of the white male genius. Additionally, I am attempting to make this NOT a story of only Silicon Valley, but of these disciplines and industries as a whole, across a swath of geography. Although I admit this is mostly western culture centered—except for brief mentions of the first cases of moveable type and the invention of paper coming from China and Korea. While attempting to not focus on SV, I recognize that there are major milestones and inventions that came out of the unique brew of the valley and we will be discussing those as well.
It’s been interesting to get to the point in IXD history where the Internet starts to take over. This is the history of my own career; of the people I have worked with over the years, all coming from different paths and disciplines.
It’s an interesting perspective to look back over the last 30 years of history and realize that the work I have been doing all these years is all rolled up into this evolution of a single practice from many, and that my journey is the history of IXD—from BBS’s to Kodak touchscreens to AOL Greenhouse to Adobe’s first website to Elon Musk’s first startup (Zip2) to the dot com boom of AltaVista Live! the portal to the great bust and being laid off and back to AOL then Yahoo! to platforms and patterns and products and websites and software as a service to social apps and helping startups take advantage of mobile and cross media delivery and finally to working with the ADL to map and model the systems of online hate.
I am like many of the thousands of working designers, writers, researchers, psychologists, and anthropologists drawn into this practice BECAUSE of the fact that it touches on so many disciplines to become it’s own thing and because when we started, we got to make the whole thing up as we went along—refining and iterating to see what worked and what didn’t—and in our own way, we designed our way into a solid profession.”