Hasta La Ideas

In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year’s event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year’s conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don’t miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!

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Interaction Design (IxD) is reaching a critical point in its history. We have spent the better part of the last half century converging. We have built our entire identity by bringing in other disciplines and practices into our fold. We are often decried as “land grabbers,” but I say it is more about shoring up our knowledge base and practice so that we can be ready for the ever-increasing complexity of the tasks set before us through our acknowledged focus on human behavior as it relates broadly to the interaction of systems.

But it seems that in order to do this Borg-like assimilation of so many different sources (see this great video about Information Architects (IA) doing the same thing) we did not account for the long-term effect this might have on our community of practice, mostly due to our lack of solid foundation.

So it is with sadness that I announce that in the last year IxD, as a community of practice, has faced its strongest challenge to date. We have shifted from converging and assimilating to a community that is ever rapidly diverging.

The divergence is happening along the lines of the gravitational interests from where interaction design was born or where the slippery slope of our primary interest takes us. The divergence is also because the level of complexity of our problem sets have grown so vast that no single group can or should keep track of all of it. We have split basically along our primary lines of interest: Engineering, Individuals (psychology), Culture (anthropology) and Art.

While this year sees the greatest fracturing, I have been tracking the creation of these fault lines since I first helped to start the IxDA. Not unlike the early days of information architecture (IA) where talk of East Coast vs. West Coast IA filled the community’s discourse, today the rifts we see in IxD are quite similar. People much like myself have forged interests and communities around the lines of engineering, psychology, culture and art, and each communities have forged practices that further set them apart from others. Rhetorical frameworks have been formed as well, further galvanizing differentiation and making it harder for disparate communities to share knowledge or more importantly, share in the creation of new knowledge.

For me, the image below best expresses how I see the current gravitational pulls facing the interaction designer today.

This grid represents the extremes of people’s gravitational pulls. Few people practice at the edges (though there are some).

Let’s review the axis and how they translate to the quadrants they create.

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