The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Gosh, well that’s a big topic. The weather features for experience. The important bits. The meaningful handles.
We could do worse, I think, than look at places, in the real world, where the process is the important thing, as or more important than the task. For inspiration, we need to find times where we celebrate how it’s done on top of what is done. We can mimic these patterns and inspire product design.
Let me give you an example.
Thresholds.
Thresholds. The boundary between one state and another. We encounter thresholds on any journey where the size of the step we take doesn’t parallel the importance of it. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon for the first time, that was a step just like any other for him. He could have been walking in the park (a barren, airless park a quarter million miles from home). But in terms of what it represented, in politics, and society, and the class of Communism and the West… well, we had to celebrate it to show how important that step was.
Another one: Going from public space into private space. It’s a regular step in the physical world, the regular 14 inches, but everything else in the social world, legal world, ownership, expectations and so on changes. So we celebrate that threshold: We build porches, lockable doors, front steps, hang decorations.
Maria – remember her? – pointed out another manifestation of the threshold: Brown paper packages tied up with string. Gifts aren’t important here. It’s not having new stuff which is important. It’s the experience of receiving gifts and, more specifically, crossing that celebrated threshold of something coming into my ownership.