Interaction Design Sketchbook

            Bill Verplank’s guide to Interaction Design consists of four parts: sketching, Interaction, Design, and Paradigms. Sketches help you explore and take note of preliminary observations and ideas as well as support creativity.  According to Robert McKim, Sketches help to explore a problem or idea in “an uncritical mode of thinking” which produces quantity and variety. McKim suggests that sketches may go through an express mode, followed by a test, and then followed by a cycle where the next “express” idea is chosen.

            The interaction part of interaction design focuses on how to design products for people’s physical and emotional needs. Interaction design consists of three questions: “How do you do? How do you feel? How do you know?” The first question explores different ways a task can be accomplished, like whether an action happens by pressing a button or turning a handle. The second question takes the senses into account and determines how the product makes us feel. The last question asks how do you know your solution fulfills the need of its target audience. This can be accomplished through path knowledge, knowing one step at a time, or map knowledge.

            Design interaction “involves balancing a variety of concerns using a variety of methods or representations.” Different methods and representations used in interaction design are the processes of motivations, meanings, modes mappings, and observation, invention, engineering and appearance. To create a successful interactive design a designer must analyze the interaction of the subject with the product and create a model that organizes this behavior.

            Paradigms are distinct concepts or patterns. Competing paradigms can come between a person and their environment creating an interaction design problem, these things can also be called “extensions.” Electronics are extensions of our sense through media. Human interaction with computers is a competition between three paradigms: brains, tools, and media. Computers are viewed as brains through the concept of “artificial intelligence,” as tools through direct manipulation, and as media through communication and entertainment. The paradigms life, vehicle, and fashion can also be applied to computers.