ACM Interactions

Seeing as how everyone else is starting with an introduction, I figure I might as well explain what a guy like me is doing in a place like this (spoiler: I’m not an HCI guy).  

Hi, my name is Tim. I’m an American living in Sydney, Australia. Like many of you, I’m a designer who has been through a couple different twists and turns in my design life. Before arriving to this sunburnt country, I spent six years at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) gathering up a couple of degrees, including a Masters of Design, then spent four years consulting to the United States Postal Service as an interaction and information designer through a sponsored research project, also at CMU. I finally left the university community eight years ago when I was recruited to Second Road, a strategy and innovation consultancy based out of Sydney that uses design thinking to solve major business and management problems. I’ve been living in a British Commonwealth country for the better part of the past decade, so I’ll apologise in advance for using a few more u’s and a few less z’s than most might be used to.  

Before we go any further, I want to come clean. As I alluded to earlier, I don’t work in the field of human-computer interactions. In fact, I don’t work with technology very much at all. While I am an interaction designer, I’m not an HCI guy. If you’re looking for that, I’d recommend checking out some of the other bloggers on this site (you can start with my buddy Uday Gajendar; he’s a brilliant HCI guy who’s always got intriguing stuff to say). Rather, I have spent most of my career looking at how interaction design can be applied to human systems and organisations as a whole. 

When I first entered the world of interaction design, I thought the field was chiefly concerned with how people interacted with technology. I thought it was all interfaces and devices and coding. And while all of these things seemed terribly important and clearly required intelligent consideration and design, I found myself drawn to the questions associated with human interactions—specifically, how do humans interact with systems and with one another in meaningful and productive ways? 

At Second Road, I play the role of a business designer—a consultant who designs strategies and value propositions, builds design capabilities within organisations, and co-designs methods to engage and enable workforces and stakeholders. But underneath all of this, I see my key goal as getting the decision makers of organisations to look at their problems the way designers would. 

That is to say, I want them to first see problems as opportunities to learn about the reality of a clearly dissatisfying situation or context, particularly from the point of view of the people involved. What are the people trying to accomplish? What is currently being done to support them in their activities or provide them with a vision or direction? 

Then, I want these business leaders to understand that they are being presented with a chance to better understand the participants or users of that system in a way that will give an honest view of what would make that situation more satisfying, successful, or point them in the direction of creating something entirely different. 

This leads to the most difficult part: understanding that they can now make something new. To designers and innovators, we see this as a given. But to many decision makers within organisations, this is a paralysing position, a point where there is no clear way forward. My goal is to get business leaders to embrace this position, and see the ambiguity as a chance to create new, valuable experiences in the world. 

It has been my experience that these issues present the greatest difficulty when they involve systems that are, at their core, non-technical human systems.

Technical systems have long been the purview of design, from software developers and network designers to mechanical engineers and machine fabricators. Great leaps forward in design have been made thanks to the thoughtful application of design in these contexts. Interaction design itself finds its origins in the realm where human systems intersect with these technical systems. How are people meant to use that which has been created by the software developers and network designers and mechanical engineers and machine fabricators? 

But what about the systems that don’t have technology at their core? What about the human systems themselves? What about the HR systems and the strategy development systems and the customer experience systems? How can design be applied to the situations that these systems are meant to operate within? This is the world of interaction design that I find myself exploring. 

My hope is to explore these spaces in this blog, with all of you and my fellow bloggers. I also hope that these explorations might be more than solo missions—I’m a firm believer that clarity emerges through dialogue, conversations produce knowledge, and debate makes everyone smarter. So feel free to contribute. Tell me about your experiences and challenges of trying to apply interaction design to these spaces. Or tell me if you think I’m way off base and interaction design has nothing do to with this stuff. Either way, I’ll be happy to engage in the conversation.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing where this leads.

Tim Fife