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Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?

In the Cooper Journal, Tim McCoy responds to Bill Moggridge's comment after a screening of Objectified. He paraphrases Moggridge as saying interaction design has become pervasive, that anyone and everyone can be an interaction designer, and so the role of professional interaction designer is (or is becoming) unnecessary.

McCoy asks if interaction design is really dead. He goes on to point out a few factors that have allowed developers to build better interfaces without interaction designers. The main point I took away is that the need for the expertise and craft of interaction design is not dead, but the perception that the need for the role seems to be diminished given tools and awareness.

Awareness and tools alone, however, don't breed expertise. Clearly if it did, there'd be a lot less awfully designed stuff out there. Or to take a craft like video editing as an example, we'd see an awful lot more people doing much slicker looking stuff on YouTube.

It's a relevant point to make, however, that the tools and frameworks alone have enabled a lot of work to be done, especially in the building of web sites/apps, without need of an interaction designer. A lot of basic interactions can be implemented with design patterns. But not all needs are satisfied by a pattern, and isolated solutions can be implemented that don't relate to one another, or to the goals of the user. That's not to say that you need an interaction designer to design, but you do have to think of design in terms of the ecosystem, rather than of any solitary role within it. Any user experience designer that isn't doing that isn't worth his weight in business card titles.

http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/04/is_ixd_a_dead_end_job.html

Published on Thursday, Apr 30, 2009 in blog