Interaction design and digital materials

The recommended use of the term interaction design is limited to products and services which more or less rely on digital materials for their realization. This is due to the significance for a design discipline of knowing its respective design materials. It is impossible to design interaction per se, even though the term unfortunately implies otherwise, but what interaction designers do is to create conditions for interaction. It is possible to make some things more likely to happen, others less likely, and the way in which this is accomplished is by shaping the digital materials into tools, props and media for others to appropriate and use. The digital materials of software, electronics and telecommunications have specific properties that interaction designers need to understand well in order to increase the likelihood of achieving intended outcomes in use. For instance, designing a multiplayer online game is quite different from designing a (non-digital) board game. The digital-material property most significantly determining the difference in this case is the possibility for synchronous and quasi-anonymous many-to-many communication over a distance.

There is also a pragmatical argument for coupling interaction design with digital materials. Both of the main interpretations above have strong roots in fields concerned exclusively with the digital, which ought to carry more weight than any fine semantic points about what interaction "actually" means.

This is not to say that interaction design concerns itself only with purely digital products and services. For instance, it is rapidly becoming impossible to separate interaction design from industrial design in digital consumer products (even though some developers of consumer products still try). Moreover, several emerging fields in interaction design research, including tangible interaction, mixed-reality interfaces and pervasive computing, address physical form and materials as inevitably integrated with virtual form and digital materials. The point is merely that the digital materials have specific properties which greatly influence the use of products and services built from them, and the knowledge of those materials and properties form part of the core of knowledge defining the interaction design community