How Doing Interaction Design Helped My Product Design (Draft)

This article on how “aesthetics recede as behavior becomes more important”, a view put forth by Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, points to an important emerging trend in the design world. The work of Naoto Fukasawa, a Japanese designer most famous for his “Without Thought” series, highlights a growing trend in product design toward desiging the behavior of the product–how it will be used by the customer. It is a leap of quantum complexity from simply desiging surfaces (also valuable, says Virginia Postrel), because it takes into account the individual user’s situation. The days of the “one best way” are likely gone for product design, and the future lies in products that can be customized and produced for specific individuals.

This vibes with the argument of The Experience Economy, which says that the natural next step for the economic progression is from a service economy to an experience economy. The simultaneous product transformation is from items used to perform a standard task to items produced to elicit a response from an individual person–for whom each product must be customized to work properly. The technological advance necessary to enable this is the ability to do “mass customization”, to create an individualized product on-the-fly, ideally with no more effort than it takes to currently “mass produce” an item.

Dell owes nearly all their success to this philosophy. The PC computer is inherently a collection of smaller parts, of which each computer user needs only a specific set. Their breakthrough was realizing that in assembling computers, it is just as easy to put 512 MB of RAM in one PC and 128 MB in the next as it is to put 128 MB in both, and it allows you to sell to an additional buyer who wouldn’t have been satisfied with the “standard” model.

Computer-based interaction design “gets” this philosophy. Because of the low startup and prototyping costs–every new interface designed uses the same hardware to create it, and the incremental materials cost of another prototype is zero–interaction designers can prototype and test dozens of versions of a product in the time it would take a physical product designer to create just one. As David Kelley says, “fail faster to succeed sooner”–that is what interaction designers, because of their medium, are able to do.

Because of this unique medium and the rapid development it enables, interaction design has progressed with a speed unmatched by any field in history. Certainly an emerging industry makes advances faster than a mature one–but instead of plateauing off as most industries do, interaction design has embraced Moore’s Law of exponential growth, and the interfaces it creates are developing at the same rate.

So as product design sees an increasing need for pleasing “behaviors” of items, interaction designers possess an incredible head start in the design and production of interactive products, with an emphasis on enjoyable behavior.

Technical expertise is increasingly outsourced to India, China, and Japan, who have made significant investment in their ability to produce and optimize the efficiency of products. What is needed now in product design is creators skilled in the way products relate to individual, unique people. Those with experience creating individual style, empathy, and love will be the ones who find success in this field.

I’ll start a running list in the comments to this article of ways that interaction and web design have taught me empathy, style, and love in ways that can apply to the real world. More to come…