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.