By mapping out this wheel of the future, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of the potential impact of AI assistants, thereby assessing the ethical, social, and environmental feasibility of products or services in advance and providing a basis for more responsible innovation decisions.
I believe that interaction designers should take ethical responsibilities to end users when incorporating AI into their designs:
By taking on these ethical responsibilities, interaction designers not only protect the interests of users, but also promote the healthy development of AI-human interaction and build a trustworthy technology ecosystem.
shuoning.liang
Pace Layers is a framework proposed by Stewart Brand to describe the speed of change at different levels and their mutual influence. In the life cycle of interaction design, pace layers can reveal how design work evolves with changes on different time scales, thus affecting the rhythm and focus of the entire project.
The pace layer is divided into multiple levels, the common ones include nature, culture, governance, infrastructure, business and fashion
Fashion layer
Fast change: influence design trends, such as UI style. Promote conceptualization and visual design to quickly adapt to user expectations.
Business layer
Fast: Determine market needs and goals (such as conversion rate), drive early prototype development and user testing.
Infrastructure layer
Medium speed: The underlying technology limitations affect design decisions in the development and deployment stages.
How to affect the interaction design：
Definement stage: Fashion and business layers drive trend insights, governance and culture layers ensure that the design is in line with values.
Design stage: Business and infrastructure layers limit design feasibility, and fashion layers enhance user appeal.
Development stage: Infrastructure supports implementation, governance ensures compliance.
Maintenance phase: The infrastructure layer determines the update rhythm, and the cultural layer affects long-term adjustments.
The pace layer shapes the rhythm and priority of design through changes at different speeds during the interaction design lifecycle. Understanding the dynamic relationship between these layers can help design teams better balance short-term market needs and long-term user value, thereby creating sustainable design results in a rapidly changing digital environment.
Automation and collaboration in the workplace
AI will accelerate the automation of many tasks, especially repetitive and data-intensive work, such as data processing, customer support, and production line operations. This may lead to a reduction in some traditional jobs, but it will also create new jobs.
Personalized services and life optimization
The application of AI in daily life will enhance personal experience, such as customized health management, seamless integration of smart home systems, and more accurate recommendations of educational resources. These technologies will make our lives more efficient and convenient, but may also require more digital literacy and privacy awareness.
Redefinition of creativity and culture
AI creative tools (such as image generation, text creation, and music creation) will be further developed, giving artists and creators more possibilities. These tools may redefine “creativity” itself.
And from the exhibition, we can see that the earliest electronic devices were all huge devices without exception. But as the times developed, these devices became smaller and smaller, making them easier for people to carry. For example: from early giant computers to the advent of Apple.
The history in the exhibition tells us that technological change is a double-edged sword, bringing both opportunities and risks. In the next decade, we need to not only embrace the potential of artificial intelligence, but also think deeply about how to develop and use these technologies responsibly to ensure that they serve the long-term well-being of humanity.
Behind this question lies an important mission: how to shape the future of our coexistence with artificial intelligence?
shuoning.Liang
Interaction requirements of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is an Internet era that emphasizes user interaction, content sharing, and social networking. Compared with the static web pages of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 emphasizes dynamic content, user-generated content, and higher user participation. At this stage, interaction design becomes particularly important because users are no longer just recipients of information, but participants and content creators.
A core feature of Web 2.0 is to allow users to create and share content. This means that websites must provide easy-to-use interfaces that allow users to quickly upload, edit, and share information. For example, blogging platforms (such as WordPress), video sharing sites (such as YouTube), and social media platforms (such as Facebook) all rely on user-generated content.
The rise of social networks is one of the most important signs of Web 2.0. Interaction design needs to support interaction between users, including functions such as commenting, liking, sharing, private messaging, and following.
Web 2.0 provides more personalized and customized functions, and websites can provide customized content based on user behavior and preferences. This requires the interaction design of the website to be flexible and responsive to user needs.
Differences between Web 2.0 and current interaction design
Web 2.0 interaction design focuses more on user participation and content generation, but with the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning, today’s Internet platforms can provide more personalized and automated experiences. For example, today’s online shopping platforms (such as Amazon) automatically recommend products based on users’ browsing history and purchasing behavior.
Today’s Internet applications pay more attention to seamless integration between different platforms. For example, users can seamlessly switch between multiple devices (mobile phones, computers, tablets, etc.), while Web 2.0 platforms focus more on computers or specific devices.
Compared with Web 2.0, which mainly relies on keyboard, mouse and touch screen interaction, modern Internet products integrate more speech recognition and natural language processing technologies. These technologies have greatly changed the way of interacting with devices, making human-computer interaction more natural.
Summary
Web 2.0 emphasizes user participation, social interaction and personalized experience, which puts forward new requirements for interaction design, especially in simplifying operations, supporting real-time collaboration and content sharing. In comparison, modern Internet technology has developed to the stage of intelligence, cross-platform and immersive experience. Interaction design is not only more intelligent and personalized, but also begins to introduce advanced technologies such as voice, AI, AR/VR, which promotes the further evolution of user experience.
shuoning.liang
The iPod and iPhone have had a profound impact on our relationship with technology, especially in terms of interactive design. These two devices have changed how people interact with technology products and promoted the evolution of modern smart device design.
The impact of iPod and iPhone on our relationship with technology
The iPod and iPhone introduced unprecedented simple and intuitive user interfaces. The iPod uses a click wheel and a simple button layout, allowing users to quickly get started and experience the fun of music playback. The iPhone, on the other hand, has completely changed the way people interact with technological devices through a multi-touch screen. Through gesture operation, users can interact with the device more naturally and get a more intuitive experience from actions such as sliding, pinching, and clicking.
Breaking the limitations of physical buttons, such a design not only lowers the threshold for operation, but also greatly enhances the intuitiveness and fluency of interaction.
The launch of the iPhone is not just a revolution in mobile phones, it is also the beginning of the entire mobile Internet era. The iPhone’s App Store allows developers to interact directly with users through applications, which opens up a new market for developers around the world. People’s lives gradually revolve around these devices, and mobile phones have become the core tool for connecting work, entertainment, social life and other aspects of life.
Impact on interaction design
The success of iPod and iPhone marks the rise of user-centered design concept. The interface design of iPhone is based on user intuition, which simplifies the interaction process and enables users to quickly master the operation without much learning. This prompted the entire industry to shift to a design approach that pays more attention to user needs and behaviors, emphasizing how to make it easier for users to understand and use technology through a simple and intuitive interface.
The compact design and powerful functions of iPhone make the concept of “mobile first” an important trend in interaction design. Developers and designers began to consider how to make applications and websites display smoothly on different devices, and responsive design and cross-platform compatibility became increasingly important.
Summary
The innovation of iPod and iPhone not only changed our relationship with devices, but also profoundly affected the development of interaction design. By introducing simple, intuitive design and touch operation, the smoothness of user experience has been improved, which has promoted the rapid development of mobile Internet and smart devices. As a result, the field of interaction design has shifted to a direction that pays more attention to user needs and personalized experience, forming the mainstream trend of modern design.
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Rather than stifling creativity in interaction design, the use of design systems and interaction design patterns can promote creativity in many ways. This is because they provide structure and consistency in the design process, allowing designers to focus their energy on innovation and optimization of the user experience.
Design systems and interaction design patterns provide designers with a solid foundation, such as basic elements such as color, typography, buttons, and layouts. By reducing repetitive work, designers can focus more on exploring new interactions, animations, user journeys, and functional innovations. This improves the efficiency of the overall design process, giving designers more time to think creatively and solve complex problems.
Design systems ensure visual and interactive consistency throughout the product, and users benefit from it. Designers can innovate more freely within the system in this case without worrying about disrupting overall consistency.
Design patterns can provide inspiration for designers and help them understand different types of interactions and user behaviors. Designers can draw on these patterns for deeper innovation and customization to meet the needs of specific projects.
While design systems and interaction design patterns provide structure, they do not restrict creativity, but instead provide a framework for designers to innovate in a clearer and more consistent environment. Creativity often thrives within limitations, and these tools provide designers with constraints while also providing room for innovation.
Shuoning Liang
The shift from web design to user experience design (UX design) is driven by a number of factors. With the advancement of the Internet and technology, the complexity of websites has increased, and traditional web design is no longer sufficient to meet the growing needs of users.
Users have higher and higher expectations for digital products. They not only want websites to be beautiful, but also want them to be easy, fast and barrier-free to use.
Modern design principles focus more on user-centered methodologies and emphasize understanding user needs and behaviors. User research, testing and data-driven design have become key, pushing design from a static approach based on interfaces to experience design that focuses on user behavior and feelings.
Improving user experience can directly affect business results, such as increasing conversion rates and user satisfaction. Companies recognize that investing in UX design is an important strategy to improve the competitiveness of products and services.
UX design integrates multiple disciplines such as psychology, human-computer interaction, information architecture and visual design, making it an overall design field that goes beyond the traditional scope of web design.
In summary, the evolution of user needs, technological advances and changes in the business environment have all contributed to the shift from web design to user experience design.
Shuoning Liang
The government has a unique advantage in funding basic research and projects that bear higher risks, because its driving force is usually not direct profit, but long-term social benefits. The early R&D cycle of technology is long, the capital demand is large, and the risk of success is high. It may not be able to bear or persist relying solely on corporate and market forces. Therefore, government funding is very critical in laying the foundation for technology.
Enterprises usually have a strong momentum to bring technology to market, and are good at productization, meeting consumer needs, and rapidly expanding applications.
Open source projects and communities can promote innovation in a decentralized way, providing transparency, openness and cooperation for technological development. Through the contributions of many developers, the open source community can make rapid progress in refining problems, fixing vulnerabilities, and expanding applications.
The government, enterprises and open source communities each have their own advantages in promoting technological innovation. The government is suitable for funding high-risk, long-term basic research to lay the foundation for technology; enterprises are good at marketization and user demand-driven, and can quickly transform technology into usable products; open source communities promote openness and cooperation, and promote transparent and flexible innovation. The ideal model is a collaborative collaboration among the three.
shuoning Liang
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have evolved significantly since the early days of the Macintosh and Windows, from simple two-dimensional, low-resolution designs to today’s highly complex, flexible, multi-dimensional interfaces. Visual design has evolved from single colors and basic window structures to high-resolution graphics, 3D rendering, and animation, with support for touch and gestures, especially on mobile devices.
At the same time, many basic design concepts and core structures such as desktops, windows, icons, taskbars, and navigation bars have remained. These elements form the foundation of the GUI, helping users understand the interface and operate it easily, allowing the GUI to maintain a familiar framework as it changes.
However, despite significant technological and design advances, modern GUIs still have room for improvement:
Accessibility: Although accessibility options are common in GUIs, support for visually impaired, hearing-impaired, and mobility-impaired users still needs to be improved. Improving accessibility features such as tactile feedback, voice output, screen readers, and keyboard shortcuts can help ensure that all users can use the interface equally.
In general, although GUI has achieved a qualitative leap in vision, interaction and device adaptability, it still needs to be optimized in terms of consistency, accessibility, information management and privacy protection to better adapt to the diverse needs of users and further enhance the user experience.
Shuoning.Liang
Lucy Suchman’s research, especially her work with front-end operators at Xerox, has profoundly influenced the way we understand whether technology design meets human needs.
Human behavior is complex and is not within the designer’s preset process. This shows that design must take into account user preferences and operating habits, rather than relying solely on the system’s internal logic to plan operating steps.
Suchman pointed out that predefined operating steps alone often cannot meet the needs of actual operations because users will encounter various unpredictable situations in reality. Designers should ensure that technical systems can flexibly adapt to various usage situations by observing and understanding users’ real usage scenarios.
In the previous video, we reviewed Suchman’s theory, especially in the Xerox listening study, where she revealed how traditional technology design failed to adapt to users’ real needs through observation of operators. This reminds us that when designing technology, we must focus on people’s operating methods and thinking habits.
shuoning Liang
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The exhibition, featuring work by students from the University of Art and Design Geneva, was held at Swissnex in San Francisco and provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of art, design and technology. The projects on display reflected a range of innovative approaches that combined traditional art practices with cutting-edge digital technologies, embodying a spirit of experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration. I was intrigued by the projects and works on display, including the film produced using AI, which effectively embodied the future of the integration of art and technology. But I was also confused by the little game about submarines. I really couldn’t understand what it needed to say, and I couldn’t even play it.
However, the students’ work explored themes such as identity, sustainability, and the impact of technology on society. Some works delved into personal narratives and used multimedia installations or interactive formats to engage audiences in new ways. These projects challenged traditional art forms and used virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other digital tools to push the boundaries of art while reflecting on the impact of these technologies.
Overall, the exhibition not only celebrated the students’ creativity, but also invited viewers to reflect on the changing relationship between technology and human experience. It emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary exchanges in shaping the future of art and design.
The Xerox Star revolutionized computing by introducing key concepts that are the foundation of the modern graphical user interface (GUI).
It was the first commercial system to use a fully developed GUI with icons, windows, and a desktop metaphor, making computers more intuitive, especially for non-technical users.
The desktop metaphor allowed users to visualize files, folders, and documents as physical objects, a concept that continues to shape modern interfaces. It also pioneered WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing, enabling users to see on screen exactly what would appear when printed, paving the way for the modern word processor.
The Star’s use of icons, menus, and overlapping windows made multitasking possible, influencing later systems such as Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. In addition, it had networking capabilities with Ethernet support, allowing file and printer sharing across networks, which laid the foundation for future networked personal computing.
Although not a commercial success, the design principles of the Xerox Star profoundly influenced the direction of personal computing.
shuoning Liang/10/8
shuoning liang 9/30
Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration was an important milestone in mid-century innovation.
Revolutionizing human-computer interaction
Engelbart invented the computer mouse, a tool that revolutionized how users interacted with computers. This intuitive interface paved the way for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and became the standard for later computing.
Collaboration tools The demonstration highlighted real-time collaboration
capabilities and showed how computers can facilitate teamwork. This vision has influenced the development of modern collaboration tools, such as cloud-based document sharing and communication platforms.
A vision for the future of computing
Engelbart’s vision of a computer-enhanced future inspired subsequent generations of innovators. His ideas laid the foundation for personal computing and the development of the digital revolution.
Engelbart’s demonstration was therefore a key event in mid-century innovation, reshaping our understanding of the role of technology in society. Its influence spans fields ranging from computing to education and continues to influence the development of modern technology
shuoning Liang 2024/9/24
Gestalt principles have
Proximity：
Arrange related interface elements (such as buttons, text boxes, and icons) closely so that users can more easily understand their relationship.
Similarity
Use the same color, shape, or font to unify the design of controls with similar functions to enhance the consistency of the interface.
Connectedness
Group related information or operation options together through visual connections (such as lines, borders, etc.) to help users quickly understand the hierarchy of information.
Closure
By adding clear boundaries to elements, let the user’s brain automatically complete unclosed shapes.
Continuity
The arrangement of design interface elements should be regular and consistent.
And Fitts’s law has
Target size
Fitts’s law shows that the larger the target, the faster users will click it. When designing, make sure that the buttons or clickable areas are large enough, especially key function buttons (such as submit, save, etc.) to reduce user misoperation.
Target Distance
Reduce the distance between key operating elements to prevent users from moving too much on the screen.
Edges and Corners
According to Fitts’s Law, the edges and corners of the screen are more clickable areas due to physical limitations. Common functions can be placed in these locations to improve interaction efficiency.
Design strategies that combine the two
Logical grouping and quick operations
Group related functions through the proximity and similarity of the Gestalt, and optimize the distance based on Fitts’s Law. For example, arrange the editing options in the toolbar (such as cut, copy, and paste) closely, and the buttons are large, which is convenient for users to operate quickly.
So, what I will do?
1.Use the similarity of the Gestalt to design consistent interactive buttons, while ensuring that the size and position of the buttons comply with Fitts’s Law, so that users have consistent perception of operations on different pages, and do not need to spend extra time looking for or clicking.
By combining the Gestalt principles with Fitts’s Law, you can create an intuitive, responsive, and visually clear interactive interface, greatly improving the user experience and satisfaction.
Shuoning liang 2024/9/23
Fei-Fei Li’s speech demonstrated the profound connection between technological innovation and human needs through her personal growth and her contribution to artificial intelligence (AI). In “The World in My Eyes” and her sharing at the Computer History Museum, Fei-Fei Li talked about how she combined her immigrant experience with technological exploration to promote the development of computer vision and AI. Her work especially focuses on how to make AI more humane, which has important implications for interactive design (IXD).
A key point she emphasized is that AI must serve humans, which made me realize that in IXD practice, design is not just about pursuing functions, but also about bringing more humane interactive experiences. Fei-Fei Li’s development of ImageNet showed how large-scale datasets can provide cognitive capabilities for AI, which inspired me to have a deep understanding of user needs in the design process and prompted me to think about how to better understand user behavior through technology to optimize interactive design.
At the same time, her experience in applying computer vision to various fields such as medical care made me realize that in IXD, designers should not only consider the direct needs of users, but also apply technology to broader social issues to make design more socially influential.
9/17, 2024, shuoning liang
Ada Lovelace’s forward thinking gets us thinking about the potential for technology to interact with humans. Her theory is not only an exploration of technological capabilities but also a vision of their application to human multidimensional life. This perspective spanning technology and human experience was one of the early intellectual foundations of IXD.
move.
Lillian Gilbreth applies this interdisciplinary thinking to practice. By studying the intersection of ergonomics, psychology and engineering, he proposes that design must revolve around human needs. This understanding and optimization of “user experience” is an integral part of IXD.
- shuoning Liang，2024fall/IXDSN-3600-1，2024/9/7
One of the most popular mapping software is Google maps which has many modern images and icons. In contrast to ancient hieroglyphics, they are also forms of visual shorthand. Ancient writing, especially Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, required learning complex associations and meanings associated with culture and language, since literacy was one of the privileges of the nobility.
The following images show the most popular symbols used by Google maps (you can find them elsewhere in your daily life)
1. Location Pin Icon
2. Directions Icon
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Both systems are effective in their respective times and technologies, but they reflect different approaches to visual communication and symbolism.