Interaction Design Foundation

Last updated

The Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) is an educational organization [1] which produces open access educational materials [2] [3] online with the stated goal of "democratizing education by making world-class educational materials free for anyone, anywhere." [4] [5] The platform also offers courses taught by industry experts and professors in user experience, psychology, user interface design, and more. [6]

Contents

While not accredited, the curriculum and content are structured at the graduate level, targeting at both industry and academia in the fields of interaction design, design thinking, user experience, information architecture, and user interface design.

The centerpieces of the Interaction-Design.org are their online design courses, their local chapters in more than 150 countries, and their peer reviewed Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, which currently holds 40+ textbooks written by 100+ leading designers and professors as well as commentaries and HD video interviews shot around the world. [2] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] The platform features professional and academic textbooks, online courses, video lectures, local chapters in more than 150 countries, and a comprehensive bibliography of the most authoritative publications within the design of interactive technology.

In June 2013, the Interaction Design Foundation launched a 4 year 35,000 mile bike tour, named "Share the Knowledge Tour", [13] to raise awareness of the rising cost of education - with weekly events on university campuses. [14] [15]

Financial sponsors include the German software company SAP. Authors include Harvard professor Clayton Christensen [16] [17] and New York Times bestselling author, Robert Spence [18] who invented the "magnifying glass" visualization that is familiar to anyone with an iPhone or iMac, and Stu Card [18] who performed the research that led to the computer mouse's commercial introduction by Xerox.

The Executive Board currently include Don Norman, Ken Friedman, Bill Buxton, Irene Au, Michael Arent, Daniel Rosenberg, Jonas Lowgren and Olof Schybergson.

See also

Related Research Articles

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.

Mihai Nadin is a scholar and researcher in electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, semiotics, human-computer interaction (HCI), computational design, post-industrial society, and anticipatory systems. His publications on these topics number over 200, and he has lectured throughout the world.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

Human-centered computing (HCC) studies the design, development, and deployment of mixed-initiative human-computer systems. It is emerged from the convergence of multiple disciplines that are concerned both with understanding human beings and with the design of computational artifacts. Human-centered computing is closely related to human-computer interaction and information science. Human-centered computing is usually concerned with systems and practices of technology use while human-computer interaction is more focused on ergonomics and the usability of computing artifacts and information science is focused on practices surrounding the collection, manipulation, and use of information.

The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a global organisation for researchers and professionals working in the field of computing to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive media</span> Digital media which make use of moving images, animations, videos and audio

Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various forms of interactive media have emerged with impacts on educational and commercial markets. With the rise of decision-driven media, concerns surround the impacts of cybersecurity and societal distraction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface design</span> Planned operator–machine interaction

User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Persona (user experience)</span> Personalized fictional characters representing a consumer or user category

A persona in user-centered design and marketing is a personalized fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Personas represent the similarities of consumer groups or segments. They are based on demographic and behavioural personal information collected from users, qualitative interviews, and participant observation. Personas are one of the outcomes of market segmentation, where marketers use the results of statistical analysis and qualitative observations to draw profiles, giving them names and personalities to paint a picture of a person that could exist in real life. The term persona is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as pen portraits may also be used.

End-user development (EUD) or end-user programming (EUP) refers to activities and tools that allow end-users – people who are not professional software developers – to program computers. People who are not professional developers can use EUD tools to create or modify software artifacts and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language. In 2005 it was estimated that by 2012 there would be more than 55 million end-user developers in the United States, compared with fewer than 3 million professional programmers. Various EUD approaches exist, and it is an active research topic within the field of computer science and human-computer interaction. Examples include natural language programming, spreadsheets, scripting languages, visual programming, trigger-action programming and programming by example.

User experience design, upon which is the centralized requirements for "User Experience Design Research", defines the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. User experience design is a user centered design approach because it considers the user's experience when using a product or platform. Research, data analysis, and test results drive design decisions in UX design rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions, for which is known as UX Design Research. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), and encompasses all design aspects and design stages that are around a customer's experience.

Contextual design (CD) is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human–computer interfaces. In practice, this means that researchers aggregate data from customers in the field where people are living and applying these findings into a final product. Contextual design can be seen as an alternative to engineering and feature driven models of creating new systems.

Card sorting is a technique in user experience design in which a person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a dendrogram or folksonomy. It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Grudin</span> American computer scientist

Jonathan Grudin was a researcher at Microsoft from 1998 to 2022 and is affiliate professor at the University of Washington Information School working in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Grudin is a pioneer of the field of computer-supported cooperative work and one of its most prolific contributors. His collaboration distance to other researchers of human-computer interactions has been described by the "Grudin number". Grudin is also well known for the "Grudin Paradox" or "Grudin Problem", which states basically with respect to the design of collaborative software for organizational settings, "What may be in the managers' best interests may not be in the interests of individual contributors, and therefore not used." He was awarded the inaugural CSCW Lasting Impact Award in 2014 on the basis of this work. He has also written about the publication culture and history of human-computer interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human–computer interaction</span> Academic discipline studying the relationship between computer systems and their users

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".

Design for All in the context of information and communications technology (ICT) is the conscious and systematic effort to proactively apply principles, methods and tools to promote universal design in computer-related technologies, including Internet-based technologies, thus avoiding the need for a posteriori adaptations, or specialised design.

Sonic interaction design is the study and exploitation of sound as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and aesthetic/emotional qualities in interactive contexts. Sonic interaction design is at the intersection of interaction design and sound and music computing. If interaction design is about designing objects people interact with, and such interactions are facilitated by computational means, in sonic interaction design, sound is mediating interaction either as a display of processes or as an input medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Newman (computer scientist)</span> British computer scientist (1939–2019)

William Maxwell Newman was a British computer scientist. With others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s Newman demonstrated the advantages of the raster display technology first deployed in the Xerox Alto personal workstation, developing interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. With Bob Sproull he co-authored the first major textbook on interactive computer graphics.

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind and activity. It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience. Especially since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process". Core ideas are: 1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; 2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning – and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.

References

  1. ↑ "IxDF About Page". 2013-11-11.
  2. 1 2 The Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction. 2013-11-11.
  3. ↑ "Forbes.com:Meet The Danish NGO That's Taking Open-Source Education Global". Forbes.com. 2013-09-24.
  4. ↑ "Core77.com: An Open Courseware Series of Textbooks for Design". Core77. 2013-09-11.
  5. ↑ "IxDF Mission Statement". The Interaction Design Foundation.
  6. ↑ "The People Behind". The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved 2020-07-16.
  7. ↑ "Philosophy of Interaction". Johnny Holland Magazine. 12 December 2011. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  8. ↑ "'Affective Computing' – Affective Interaction". 20 January 2012. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  9. ↑ "Interaction-design launches free multimedia encyclopedia". Innovative Interactivity. Archived from the original on 23 August 2012. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  10. ↑ "Review: An Interaction Design Encyclopedia opens its Pages". Usability News. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  11. ↑ "L'Encyclopédie ultime du design d'Interaction !". Graphisme & Interactivite par Geoffrey Dorne. 21 January 2013. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  12. ↑ ""Where am I in this information space?" Bifocal Display Concept Video, 1982, via the Interaction Design.org Encyclopedia". Interactive Multimedia Technology. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  13. ↑ "Share The Knowledge Tour". Share the Knowledge Tour official website. Retrieved 28 November 2013.
  14. ↑ "Share The Knowledge Tour Visits North Carolina State University". North Carolina State University. Retrieved 28 November 2013.
  15. ↑ "Share the Knowledge Tour to visit GVSU". Grand Valley State University. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
  16. ↑ Christensen, Clayton. "Disruptive Innovation". In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). "The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  17. ↑ Norman, Donald. "Disruptive Innovation: Commentary on Christensen".
  18. 1 2 Robert Spence, Mark Apperley. "Bifocal Display". In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). "The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved 28 January 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.