Designing for Interaction Now Available!
by DanMy book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices is now in stores and is available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
I was recently interviewed by Liz Danzico for AIGA about the book. Here’s one of the highlights:
Danzico: Why is it important to design hackable products?
Saffer: That’s a good question: I’m not sure it is important. People will hack your products anyway! That being said, leaving “seams” in your product for people to customize it to suit their needs is a very interesting practice.
Danzico: Seams?
Saffer: As designers, we’re traditionally taught to get out of the way of the product, to leave no trace of ourselves or how the product was made. Think of the iPod in its hermetically sealed case, for instance. But Matthew Chalmers had this idea of “seamful systems (with beautiful seams)” where, for those so inclined, you could see and take advantage of how the system was created and adapt (hack) it for your own use. Seams afford hacking, in other words.
Companies can get new ideas for new products through exposing the seams and affording hacking, and could even repurpose their existing product to take advantage of the modifications people are doing to it. Of course, it’s also a dangerous practice. People can hack things in dangerous ways that could open up the companies to serious liability issues. If they are going to build in seams for hackers to rip open, designers need to make sure just what it is exactly they are exposing. On a financial website, of example, it’s one thing to expose the CSS so that someone could change the colors of their version of your site. It would be quite another thing to expose users’ financial data!
Danzico: For some time, people have been able to hack their TiVos to view their flickr streams on their televisions. Next, you might imagine a similar hack for YouTube videos, streaming on our TV as well. With users having this much control over the design of their environment, where does the interaction designer’s role start and end? Are interaction designers in danger of losing control?
Saffer: The idea that we as designers control any product is a myth. It’s a useful myth, to be sure, since it allows us to actually make the product. But once it is out of our hands and out into the world, we can no longer control what people do with it. Sure, we can design how we hope people will use it, but there’s no guarantee they will use it that way.
I’ve also posted the first section of chapter one (832k pdf) on the book’s website.
Happy reading!
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on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Conversations, Interaction Design, Plugs.
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