Interaction Designers must speak many languages, as they are facilitators between disciplines that have long since misunderstood each other or simply ignored one another's presence. One of these disciplines is Industrial Design, the field focused on the creation of mass-produced objects. This discipline finds its roots in the industrial revolution, as technology and manufacturing allowed for the creation of objects in multiples, and in a quick and cost-effective manner. Industrial Design is typically associated with the creation of furniture, appliances, and vehicles, and has been thought of as the profession responsible for the styling and aesthetic appeal of an object. This was certainly true at one point in time. Industrial Designers would be called in toward the end of the development of a product to “do the plastics” (essentially building a shell around the mass of gears, wires, and mechanisms inside of a complicated device). Industrial Designers often cringe, however, when introduced as the managers of form. For most practicing designers, Industrial Design is about much more than simple aesthetics or material choices. The professional world of product design and development has undergone a dramatic shift in recent years as designers realized that they were not simply servants of style. Real people were using the products they were creating. This emphasis on people rather than on style was embodied in the subfield of Human Factors Engineering and was made popular in design by Henry Dreyfuss, the first president of the Industrial Design Society of America and a designer of everything from vacuums to locomotives. Dreyfuss found himself considering the physical dimensions, or anthropometry, of people in an effort to create both emotional and physical relationships between people and objects. ¹

This shift acknowledges a number of important considerations:

Dreyfuss published his pinnacle work in 1955, with the unintentionally ironic title Designing for People (who else would we be designing for?). This text included, among other things, the “austere line drawings of a man and a woman [who]… remind us that everything we design is used by people, and that people come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes.”² These line drawings of Joe and Josephine brought the first glimpse of a truly human perspective to the design of mass-produced products, as they included the precise measurements of the human figure (from very small to very large). What a subtle and important shift in the creation of goods—to consider who would use them once they were created! This ultimately became quantified as a profession known as Human Factors, and was further expanded in the late 1980s, as Industrial Designers began to acknowledge both issues of physical stature as well as constraints related to perception, cognition, and memory. The growing mechanical and electrical complexity of mass-produced objects increased the potential for cognitive friction, and designers increasingly struggled to understand the limitations the human body places on the development of products. An interesting relationship was established between Human Factors Engineers and Industrial Designers. While the two disciplines were obviously and closely related, the scientific grounding of Human Factors research led towards a more refined, academic, and respected profession. The PhD is presently considered the terminal degree in studies of Human Factors, and many who obtain the doctorate and return to industry go on to work at corporations producing large and highly complicated physical and digital creations (such as airplanes). Design, however, continually gets relegated to the status of an applied art—the MFA, a degree in Fine Arts, is considered by many to be the terminal degree in Industrial Design. Thus, while there are many designers who both understand and respect the importance of physical, perceptual, and cognitive human factors, there are a great many who were never formally instructed in the relationships between these fields. Advances in technology, advances in materials, and a general love of form frequently take precedence over consideration of the human use of both physical and digital products. Usability is still discussed in business as a competitive differentiator—as an “extra” that can help distinguish products in the marketplace. Consider the number of times a physical or digital product has caused a high degree of frustration: When a user finds it difficult to turn the English subtitles off while viewing an American DVD, or when he can't set the clock on a brand new car, the user has experienced the results of a prioritization of some other element over the human element. This may be technology, or aesthetics, or cost—but something has been given more importance than “designing for people,” with people left to bear the brunt of that decision.

Industrial Designers continue to create objects of desire, balancing formal qualities with human-centered constraints in both major corporations and in design consultancies such as Fitch or Ziba. There is a continued realization, however, that the creation of mass-produced objects in the United States may be nearing its demise. The Chinese have nearly taken over production of manufactured goods, to the point where it is cost effective for even the Taiwanese to outsource their creations to mainland China. ³ The hundreds of design schools in China are producing thousands of capable, eager, and—most important—cheap designers. Chinese designers and engineers can soon offer the entire package of product development skills necessary to bring products to market, and at a substantial discount as compared to their American counterparts. The field of Industrial Design is threatened in the United States, and many designers are beginning to wonder if there are any core Industrial Design skills that cannot be outsourced. What jobs will remain for those designers who wish to stay in America?

Design strategist Elaine Ann explores this very issue in a short but poignant article entitled “The Top 10 Myths and Truths about Design in China.” As she explains, not all product development is going to China: “DESIGN is a very big word, from designing a corporate brand strategy, designing an innovative way of cleaning, or designing the styling of a toothbrush—we all call it ‘design.’ The bad news is if you are in the last category of ‘design’ — product form-making or styling business — it is very likely that such design services will truly move to China… Designers in the U.S. need to quickly engage in more strategic levels of design, and to create innovations that revolutionize businesses.”⁴

As the shift from pure aesthetics towards human factors was occurring in Industrial Design, an interesting and, in hindsight, nearly identical shift was occurring within the development of software products. Software engineers had typically created software to suit the functionality required by the business or that was afforded by the technology. The fact that a person was required to interact with a software solution was frequently ignored, as the presence of computing technology alone was often remarkable enough to sell products. Software design was unheard of, and if a “designer” was included in the process at all, it might have been in the capacity of a stylist—to make the ANSI graphics a bit more appealing to the eye. A great deal of the software that existed in the early 80s was not “designed” at all; instead, it was simply engineered. As computer systems began to grow in size and scope, however, a subset of computer engineering was created to deal with the complexity as it was made more apparent to the user. This world of Usability Engineering sought to make computers more usable. “User friendly,” now considered by both Designers and Usability Engineers alike to be cliché and simplistic, was a fair goal to keep in mind; the norm was decidedly unfriendly, as computers continually reported “fatal errors” (or, in the case of the original Apple Macintosh, a small icon of a bomb being displayed when trouble arose).

Usability Engineers primarily worked on the large mainframes or back-office computer systems of big corporations like Nynex or Xerox or IBM. This work was inherently tied to principles of cognitive psychology, as these engineers needed to understand the stresses memory could handle and where perception and cognition failed. Usability Inspection Methods, a landmark text on assessing the usability of complicated computer systems, was originally published in 1994 and included methodologies like the heuristic evaluation method, pluralistic walkthrough method, and cognitive walkthrough method. These names reflect the nature of much of the usability work being done in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Highly complicated systems were confusing, difficult to use, and boring, and the Usability Engineers attempted to fix at least the first two points. The low-hanging fruit was usability. By making the systems easier to use, a majority of the cognitive friction would disappear and business could reap the potential profits. Jakob Nielsen, then an engineer at SunSoft (of Sun Microsystems), developed several guidelines for the creation of usable software. One of the guidelines present in Nielsen's widely cited and taught Heuristic Evaluation methodology is “Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative usability.”⁵ The guideline advocates for simplicity: remove extra aesthetic elements, as they compete with efficiency, time on task, or number of errors.

Usability engineering is not new—at least not when considered in the guise of the computing revolution and modern, desktop computers. Finding usability-centered articles in popular magazines and in newspapers, however, is a more recent phenomenon. The presence of vocabulary and content relating to usability testing in more approachable texts (like Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times) may be due to the explosion in popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past decade. The complexity of the relationships between websites, hardware and software is such that audiences have begun to understand—and demand—more from their products.

The implications of this popularity, however, are both good and bad. On the one hand, usability practitioners are being pushed to reduce complexity and unnecessary difficulties in products, and the outcome of these activities includes the creation of solutions that are easier to use and to understand. However, the presence of the usability-centered vocabulary in popular culture, such as with the design of web sites, has created a misconception as to the fields of usability engineering, usability testing, and Interaction Design. There now exists an overwhelming number of people who fancy themselves “web designers”—skilled at the creation of simple web sites, but not in the rich and intellectual underpinnings of Usability or Design proper. Interaction Designers find themselves in the awkward position of trying to explain that “Why yes, I do work on web sites, but that's just a tiny portion of my job.” Richard Buchanan, former head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses the humanization of technical fields without resorting to subjugation: “Design is not a trivial aspect of the development of information technologies; it is the central discipline for humanizing all technologies, turning them to human purpose and enjoyment.”⁶

At the heart of the “usability engineering” phenomenon is an understanding of the humans who are experiencing a product—understanding how their brain works, how their memory works, and how they make complicated decisions in order to complete tasks and achieve goals. This understanding can be grounded formally in the fields of perceptual and cognitive psychology. Understanding limits to comprehension becomes of critical importance when tasks become complicated. Frequently, human factors engineers work to develop complicated systems, such as air traffic control interfaces or controls for planes—generally, demanding tasks that require snap decisions based on a great deal of immediately appearing data. It may not be appropriate for one trained in the visual arts (i.e., one trained to trust his intuition) to “intuit” the layout of a control panel on a Boeing 777. The potential for catastrophic error seemingly outweighs the need for aesthetically pleasing interfaces.

Usability Engineering—and the aforementioned Jakob Nielsen himself—became in vogue in popular culture as business embraced the World Wide Web as another distribution channel for products and struggled to understand how it could best utilize this new medium to its financial advantage. Nielsen has had a great deal of success marketing guidelines for web usability, with articles entitled “21 guidelines for making Flash easier to use for users with disabilities” and “65 guidelines for serving individual and institutional investors, financial analysts, and business journalists on corporate websites.”⁷ While these articles provide very concrete and alluring recommendations for usability improvements, they simultaneously diminish the importance of the other aspects of experience. Emphasis is placed on following guidelines rather than examining real people. While a major facet of Interaction Design is grounded in Usability Engineering (and therefore deeply embedded in computer science), the discipline is quickly growing much larger—and more robust—than can be contained in a set of guidelines or principles.

Usability engineering as a form of applied psychology is utilitarian and can even be thought of as altruistic. Psychology has crept into the development of products in a more sinister way as well. Ralph Caplan recalls that “In the 1950s Freudian market researchers invaded product design, led by psychoanalyst Dr. Ernest Dichter, who found that in the buried fantasies of the male consumer, a convertible really meant a mistress, while a sedan symbolized wife and family.”⁸ Attempts to psychoanalyze consumers have grown in the development of recent products, and the role of marketer seems to have shifted from announcing “what we have” to illustrating “what you could have,” and finally, to trying to force a consumer to realize “what you think you need.”

For the most part, however, cognitive psychologists involved in Interaction Design activities attempt to reconcile the limits of human behavior with the advances of technology, and to utilize technology in a way to help the human condition. Ken Koedinger, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, creates cognitive models—computer simulations of thinking and learning, which are then used to develop educational materials and programs. These models have been used successfully in the development of tutoring software that appropriately responds to an individual's methods of problem solving. In fact, Koedinger explains that this type of program—for example, an Algebra Cognitive Tutor—has helped students outperform their peers by as much as 100% on real world problem solving. ⁹

The parallel growth of Industrial Design focusing on the human body, and usability engineering and cognitive psychology focusing on the human mind, can in hindsight be thought of as the roots of the convergent product design solutions we are beginning to enjoy today. As these two worlds begin to collide due primarily to the miniaturization of technology and the ease—and cost—of integrating digital components into physical devices, a new breed of designer has been given the difficult task of creating convergent products that are actually easy to use and pleasant to encounter. And just in time, as the roots of both physical and digital product development seem to be turning quickly into “commodity” fields, where quality and function are nearly ubiquitous and cost becomes the only differentiator in service. As software development is unloaded to India, and physical product development makes its way to China, the cohesion of user experience across physical and digital creations becomes both critical and highly difficult.

This split also begs the question: If the technology is going to India, and the form is going to China, what is left for the United States? The answer is Interaction Design, in a rich manifestation of mind, body, and soul. One of the more strategic levels of design encompasses Interaction Design as defined in this text: the creation of a meaningful relationship between a product and a person, identified and created through ethnographic and other user-centered design methods. Interaction Design is positioned to become a strategic differentiator for businesses looking for innovative differentiation, and thus the field is a likely evolution for many Industrial Designers. This strategic level of design is one that Interaction Design is prepared to participate in, and even own—if this type of designer is able to speak the common language of business and strategy. A great number of analysts have predicted just this sort of respect and strategic placement of design within traditional businesses. Daniel Pink, an author and business strategist, has been quoted repeatedly in major news publications as saying that “The MFA is becoming the new MBA.”¹⁰

The buzz surrounding this simple meme illustrates a glimmer of hope for businesses pushing and retaining creativity within the standard business development process.

Pink goes on to explain that “businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent—physically beautiful and emotionally compelling.”¹¹ Traditionally, however, those who understand and embrace creativity seem to have a strong aversion to business (the opposite is also true). Art school brings to mind images of pierced parts and colorful hair, and doesn't usually elicit thoughts of the stoic, walnut-trimmed board room. Creativity alone is not enough. This creative force needs to be managed, understood, and strategically applied. This management can only be attained by one who can bridge the gap between the “suits” and the “freaks.” This is one with strong creative thinking skills, vocabulary relating to business and strategy, and the ability to blend easily into a diverse set of cultures. The historic intermingling of Industrial Design, Psychology, and Business Development points towards a future of mass-produced, innovative products that function “under the radar” of our cognition—products that are usable, useful, and desirable. Interaction Design is the discipline best prepared to take on the project management associated with the development of these products, as Interaction Designers are formally trained in understanding culture, managing creativity, and forging relationships between multiple disciplines.