ACM Interactions

Welcome to my new writing space. I thought I'd start by telling y'all a little about myself, my journey or story to this great intersection of my life's possibilities, influences, inspirations, etc. This will give you an idea about what you can expect to learn from this space and you can decide if maybe my journey's history will lead you to join its future.

I’ve been on a very untraditional path in my career and it has both been a joy and a struggle of mine. I have no formal training in anything I do. The one formal degree I have—a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley—while relevant, hasn't been nearly as useful in my journey as some may have thought it might.

I will say that this culturally centric perspective that I have, which attracted me to anthropology, is also what drives my perspectives as a designer. I am forever cursed with the acute awareness that everything is culturally derived (almost without exception). While I appreciate the psychological perspectives, especially around those of perception and cognition, the social and cultural is where I live.

This view of the world around me translates to interaction design through the arts, especially those arts where time is a key characteristic of both their composition and creation. Looking at the performing arts—plays, film, music, dance, and their combinations—greatly informs how I view interaction design as fundamentally different from other types of classical design: interactive design, graphic design, industrial design, architecture, fashion, interior, etc.

It's not that this perspective of time, motion, movement, story, character, etc. can't be associated with all media, but rather that interaction design is the mechanism for that association to be applied to other media. Similarly, HCI, human factors, usability, and information architecture all play a role within these media as well.

While the other aforementioned disciplines, usually under the umbrella of user experience (UX), adequately handle the analytical side of human-centered design decisions, interaction design comes in and adds the humanistic, the poetic, the aesthetic, the cultural, and the emotional to these decisions. Being on this side of UX, it has its own role in advocacy. It doesn't only advocate knowledge and criticism, but like the others needs to advocate its own processes.

For me the greatest process paradigm to come out of (or through) IxD is storytelling. It is not unique to IxD, but there is a special way where story can play a part as both a literary/linguistic agent and a structural element in the design of complex intelligent systems that makes its application through IxD if not unique, then definitely interesting. From the creation of "characters" in personas to placing those people in plots and settings of scenarios and journey maps, storytelling has been an increasingly important tool in the belt of the interaction designer.

We know within stories we can create very emotionally engaging systems. While we run the risk of getting caught up in or otherwise distracted by these stories (that's why we still have the analytical tools at our disposal), the value of stories as a holder of institutional knowledge, creator of rhetorical frames, metaphors and other linguistic poetics, and prototyping environment makes them an invaluable tool. Stories breath early life into our concepts in a very digestible format. They also,allow us quick moments of evaluation.

So in this column, stories and storytelling will be one major theme you'll be reading about. In general, though, you'll be reading a bit about designerly being (thinking and acting). Processes, tools, environments that make design and designs successful are in total a very big interest of mine and this venue gives me the opportunity to discuss them with a fairly large yet specific audience.

Last thing…talk back. Nothing quite like screaming into the wind to make someone feel completely isolated. I don't write to be right. I write to learn where I'm wrong. Help me with my lessons as we go on this journey together.

Dave Malouf