Interaction Design

I'm going to start posting once a week. I'll design a piece, based on a topic I've been thinking on and wish to write about, and I'll publish both. I've found, partially because of my senior project, that I have a lot to say (whether or not anyone wants to hear it is another story). And I hope that writing these ideas down may help me to understand them better. Design plays a wonderfully important role in the communication of ideas, and helping people (including myself) to make their ideas heard and understood is one of the driving forces behind my passion for design.

The preceeding image for this post is a rhetorical question, but I'll throw my answer out there.

Yes.

I was watching "Objectified", the Gary Hustwit documentary, yesterday and I was incredibly inspired. To hear fellow designers (yes, they were mostly industrial designers, but I think that is beside the point) saying things that I have thought and felt about design and the world in general for years was awesomly satisfying. I can see many future posts taking inspiration and quotes from the movie. I think it stands high above "Helvetica" conceptually. I hope he does more movies like it (I did like Helvetica).

"Nowadays, Interaction Design mainly refers to the software on the screen... But the way I think about it... designing hardware, things that we can touch... solid objects...is all Interaction Design" says Naoto Fukasawa, a Tokyo-based Industrial Designer. I think this statement can be directly applied to type and typography as well.

I'm not only talking about rotating type, or shrinking it, or embossing it, or animating it, or any other of the millions of ways designers manipulate characters to evoke a physical or mental experience from the reader. I'm also talking about the way in which the reader is often affected by the content of what is written and how the design of it reflects said content.

The ability to place in the reader's mind an image or thought is the first part of interaction. A typographic piece that allows the viewer to expand on this image or thought and actually do something becomes a very real example of typographic design as interaction design.

I want to learn to design successfully in this fashion. The driving force behind my desire to design is becoming more and more an eagerness to educate and inspire human beings to expand upon and better themselves and their surroundings. I believe that thinking about all fields of design with respect to the idea of interactivity is a necessary step in acheiving successful, positive, and meaningful design.

Thank you.