Designing Interactions is a collection of interviews with people who have invented and designed things that we interact with on a daily basis, from the desktop metaphor and the computer mouse to Google and the iPod. The decades worth of experience that can be distilled from this book make it a must read for interaction designers, but anyone who design for others are bound to get something out of it.

I recently found some notes I made on the DVD and though it’s been a while since I read it, I figure that now would be as good time as any to blog it. Designing Interactions will stay topical for many years to come…

As my DVD-notes illustrate Designing Interactions is so full of usefulness that it’s easy to make it sound boring. But Designing Interactions is about the people behind innovations and their stories are inspiring and engaging throughout the book. To spice it up even more ground-breakingly useful innovations are mixed with less “serious” (but arguably equally important) projects like the Nipple Chair and Meat Eating Products. And it’s richly illustrated…

Besides from the interviews Designing Interaction also comes with an excellent introduction to interaction design and a lot of interaction design philosophy by and from Bill Moggridge (the author).

Notes on some of the DVD interviews:
Bill Atkinson - the importance of user testing, Paul Bradley - prototyping, Cordell Ratzlaf - putting concepts before technology, Stu Card - how researchers can provide constrains for designers, David Liddle - the three phases of adoption, Mat Hunter - user motivation, Paul Mercer - putting development times in perspective, Terry Winograd - three interaction metaphors.

In the installation Performative Ecologies Ruairi Glynn brings up the topic of interactive vs reactive and explores how architecture can interact with rather than react to human and environmental activity.

Any artifact that can be affected by a user can be said to be interactive if the term is used in its broadest sense. However, if the term is used whenever there is some kind of communication between a user and an artifact it risks becoming diluted. For the sake of the discourse it is perhaps therefore better to reserve interactive for two-way communication and to use the terms reactive and responsive for one-way communication.