Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome.
Moggridge and his interviewees discuss why a personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Digital Technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work.
William (Bill) Moggridge
William (Bill) Moggridge,
a British industrial designer, is co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based design firm IDEO. He helped design what was arguably the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass. He advocated user-centered design process in product development cycles and also worked towards popularizing interaction design as a mainstream discipline.
Moggridge is also the author of Designing Interactions, published in October 2006. ISBN 0262134748
He has also been involved in design education in the United Kingdom and the United States; he has taught at the Royal College of Art, the London Business School and Stanford University.
History
The term interaction design was first proposed by Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank in the late 1980s. To Verplank, it was an adaptation of the computer science term user interface design to the industrial design profession [1]. To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software (Moggridge 2006).
In 1989, Gillian Crampton-Smith established an interaction design MA at the Royal College of Art in London (originally entitled "computer-related design" and now known as "design interactions"). In 2001, she helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a small institute in Northern Italy dedicated solely to interaction design. Today, interaction design is taught in many schools worldwide.
