What is this Interaction Design thing anyway?
Add your thoughts on what interaction design is, or should be...
Interaction Designers are magicians creating a illusions.
You show only what is needed to create wonder and astonishment, and make everything else invisible.
Adrian Westaway, Vitamins Design
Interaction designers design the future, but they often use tools of the present to do so.
Eyal Fried, ID-Lab, http://www.interactiondesign-lab.com/360in5/
designing user experiences requires designing a space of possibility within which a performative autopoeitic process can take place
Interaction design to me is communication between humans which take different routes through digital artifacts, products etc. It is complete when it takes the most natural, intuitive form and is effortless.
It is just a link that makes people move with the things surrounded them physically, psychologically or virtually.
When you look for the unreal then it becomes real.
David Bailey
Another good quote from the IVREA archives:
"Digital artefacts are becoming the architecture of the future, shaping the life we live in practical, social and aesthetic terms. We need to start to think about designing them in terms of architecture as well as building, culture as well as engineering."
Gillian Crampton Smith, 2005
Thanks chris for this quote, 1997 seems like a long time ago!
"If software were something that the computer user just looked at, rather than operated, traditional visual design would be at the center of software design. If the spaces were actually physical, rather than virtual, then traditional product and architectural design would suffice. But computers have created a new medium -- one that is both active and virtual. Designers in the new medium need to develop principles and practices that are unique to the computer's scope and fluidity of interactivity."
Terry Winograd, "From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design", in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997, 149-162. http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/acm97.html

Interaction Design is the soft space that exists between the computer software and the human being using the software. It means that the priority shifts towards the needs of the person, rather than the computer or the software builder. It means that when I open a document in a word processor I should be able to quickly, naturally and fluidly place an image in that document without worrying that adding a word of text will blow up my page. It means that if I then shut down my word processor, the document changes will be updated without the software asking me if I want to save. It means I won't be overloaded with menus upon menus that intimidate me when I first open up a work of software. It means living, breathing human beings and how they work and interact.