INTERACTIVE DESIGN is a new field that will play a
crucial role in shaping the future of education, communication, commerce,
and the arts in the 21st century. Yet astonishingly, only a handful of
people are being educated in the field.
Interactive design is distinct from computer
programming and from visual design--fields with which it is often
confused. An interactive designer conceptualizes an application, whether
it is meant for learning Greek, telling a story, selling products on the
Internet, or delivering the news. The designer determines the appearance
of the information we seek on the World-Wide Web and the process by which
we reach it; determines how a CO-ROM behaves, and how a user must behave
to use it. Whether a new digital product comes to us on the Web, on
digital video disk, or over the emerging medium of digital television, it
has been shaped by an interactive designer--more than likely, one who has
never trained for the profession.
Just as new buildings require architects and new
films require directors, new software applications require interactive
designers. These people are the architects of cyberspace--not the
electronic architects who design the hardware and orchestrate the flow of
bits, but the information architects who design the way people navigate
cyberspace and who orchestrate users' ability to gain access to and
manipulate content. Electrical engineers are inventing cyberspace as a
medium for transmitting data. Interactive designers are inventing
cyberspace as a medium of communication.
Just as an architect might also be a builder (or a
director might be a screenwriter), an interactive designer might be a
programmer. Computer scientists have become increasingly aware of the need
for "bringing design to software" (as the title of the groundbreaking
anthology edited by Terry Winograd identifies the task), but interactive
design is not merely an extension of software engineering. It requires
visual and verbal skills, and an understanding of cognitive processes.
Most of all, it requires the ability to think beyond the current
environment, to invent the new conventions of interaction that will
transform the exponential increase in available information into a
corresponding advance in human knowledge.
In the early days of computer development, just a
few decades ago, it was possible to practice interactive design only in
sophisticated research environments, like Xerox's Palo Alto Research
Center, where the desktop interface was invented in the 1970s. In the
1980s, as the personal computer was introduced, the practice of "interface
design" grew, building on the traditions of industrial design. The
enlightened and imaginative graphics standards set by Apple Computer, and
the work of pioneering practitioner-theorists like Ben Shneiderman and
Brenda Laurel, drew attention to the new field as both a science and an
art.
Now the rapid growth of the World-Wide Web has set
off an explosion of computer-based communication. Information in all
formats--including text, still images, moving images, and interactive
simulations--is migrating into digital form more rapidly than we can
absorb it. Teachers, journalists, hackers, hobbyists, mom-and pop
entrepreneurs, technical writers, filmmakers, television producers,
advertisers, and especially self-trained young people have been designing
as they go, improvising the frameworks in which they offer and retrieve
information across the global network. They are less interested in
engineering or aesthetic principles than they are in getting the job done
before the platform changes underneath them.
The result is a wonderful proliferation of digital
content, but a confused sense of form. The more we demand of software
programs, the more impossible they become to learn. The more information
we seek on line, the less likely we are to find what we are looking for.
The faster we propel ourselves into the digital future, the more likely we
are to reproduce ,the cumbersome conventions of legacy media. We are still
recreating the instrument panel, the card catalogue, the lecture, and the
page, when we should be exploiting the potential of the computer to
organize, segment, contain, retrieve, display, and juxtapose information
in more-coherent and powerful formats.
To the extent that the digital medium is becoming
more responsive to our needs, it is the work of a near-phantom
profession--the interactive designers, often practicing under other
professional titles, who are slowly establishing the conventions of the
new medium, the genres of information transmission that will extend the
ways in which we think about the world. Those conventions can be as small
as a blinking cursor or as large as a global indexing system. They can be
as specific as a navigation structure for a single Web site or as general
as a controlled vocabulary for tagging educational material. Every new
invention makes the computer environment more coherent, turning it into
one of the "things that make us smarter," as the cognitive scientist
Donald Norman aptly describes the effect of the well-designed tool. Such
innovations build on expert practices, but they are successful largely
because their creators have gone beyond their professional training,
drawing on a sense of what is newly possible.
But though there may be no established tradition of
interactive design, there is an increasingly urgent demand for designers.
The job market for "Web designers" or "CD-ROM/DVD-ROM producers" or
"enhanced TV" gurus may fluctuate wildly over the coming years, but the
need for interactive designers will steadily increase. In the past year,
since the publication of my book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace, I have met or heard from hundreds of young
practitioners looking for better professional training. I have also become
acquainted with excellent university programs around the country, but I
have been struck by how little they have in common with one another.
Currently, people preparing for a career as an
interactive designer can choose to train in a range of wildly disparate
fields, including computer science, graphic design, communications, media
studies, educational theory, psychology, and library science. Each of
these disciplines has a different model of what a computer is. The
best-organized approach by far is the multidisciplinary field of
human-computer interaction. It is rooted in the industrial-design model of
the computer as an "information appliance," a tool for doing familiar
tasks, and which--like an oven or a typewriter--can be assessed according
to its "usability." Graphic designers, on the other hand, are trained to
see the computer screen as just another billboard or magazine cover to be
judged by visual criteria. Put those two kinds of professionals together
on a design team, and they won't be able to decide if they are making a
toaster or a poster.
The situation only gets worse as more experts are
drawn in. To programmers, the computer is shaped like whichever software
architecture they have been trained in, which means that what may seem to
a layman like a technical decision is often just a statement of
allegiance, like loyalty to a baseball team. Communications departments
see the Internet as a global telephone wire, while information scientists
view it as one huge data base. Librarians may look upon the computer as
the mother of all card catalogues, but psychologists tell us that it plays
a role more like Mother herself, as another "social actor" on the stage of
human society. On the East Coast, postmodern literary critics tend to see
the computer as a fragmented book, while on the West Coast, cinema
scholars often view it as a morphing movie. Meanwhile, business schools
are preparing their graduates to operate in a vast virtual shopping
center.
Each of those models of the computer is accurate in
its way, and each of those disciplines has something important to
contribute to the training of interactive designers. As a result, students
often finish one prestigious master's program only to enroll immediately
in a second one. Or they may opt out of the degree system altogether,
investing in a short-term certificate program in "new media," though the
software tools they learn there may be out of date in a year or two.
Even if prospective design professionals were to
master all of the relevant disciplines and all of the latest software
tools in a reasonable amount of time, they would still find themselves
ill-trained for the open-ended tasks that confront us as we struggle to
reinvent the university, the library, and the daily newspaper for the
digital age. What we need is a conceptual framework, a shared design
vocabulary that draws on various fields and enables interactive-media
professionals to talk with one another across specialties.
UNIVERSITIES should be offering standardized
professional training grounded in principles that do not change, even
though the software and hardware environments may continue to morph in the
decades ahead. Although a few institutions--such as Berkeley, Carnegie
Mellon, DePaul, Georgia Tech, Maryland, N.Y.U., Rensselaer, and
Stanford--are gallantly moving in that direction, often driven by a single
visionary or a fortuitous assortment of muitidisciplinary specialists, we
are still very far from defining a curriculum that will work well at large
numbers of institutions.
To do so, we will have to shift our perception, to
see interactive design as separate from the many fields that have claimed
it--as an independent discipline with its own goals, methods, and
competencies.
A crucial step in that direction will be a shift to
understanding the computer as a representational medium in its own right.
Significantly, we now refer to Web sites and CD-ROMS as "multimedia," just
as, in the early days of filmmaking, we referred to narrative films as
"photoplays"--the result of aiming a stationary camera at a theatrical
stage. Movies became movies when we learned to move the camera, adjust the
lighting, and splice the film. More recently, film schools have enhanced
the understanding and practice of film art by codifying and disseminating
knowledge of those techniques. What is needed now is a similar effort for
interactive design, a new standard of practice reinforced by an integrated
conception of the medium.
A design curriculum based on the representational
properties of the computer--such as its ability to display simulations, to
invite participation, to retrieve information in multiple configurations,
to model navigable space--would allow us to make the designer's tasks and
goals concrete without confining them to any single predigital
disciplinary tradition or theoretical model.
For example, a curriculum aimed at teaching
designers how to shape the behavior of the interacter might draw on the
formulaic traditions of ritual, epic song, folk choreography, and commedia
dell'arte, as well as on the standards of user-interface development. A
curriculum aimed at developing expertise in spatial navigation could draw
on the mythology of the labyrinth, the history of imaginary spaces as
memory aids, the "pattern languages" of architectural theory and urban
design, and the geographer's understanding of human spatial behavior, as
well as on the history of video-game design. A curriculum aimed at
teaching students how to segment information for coherent retrieval might
draw on controlled vocabularies like the Library of Congress's subject
index, temporal segmentation in Eisenstein's film montage, Vladimir
Propp's narrative segmentation of the Russian folktale, and Edward Tufte's
analysis of visual economy, as well as on the principles of data-base
design.
Engineers need a broader cultural context for the
work of "interaction design" (as they are increasingly calling it); so,
too, non-engineers need a more concrete understanding of software.
Concepts like recursion, abstraction, modularity, primitiveness,
encapsulation, and emergence can be taught without demanding mastery of
mathematical notation or any particular programming syntax. Students with
verbal and visual skills should not be excluded from learning to think
procedurally, as they often are in team-based programs. A live-action
role-playing game set in the French Revolution can be as valuable a
demonstration of simulation design as a C++ model of the stock market.
Just as artists are trained with figure drawing and
engineers are trained with problem sets, interactive designers should be
trained with hands-on interactive projects. That is often not the case,
and even when it is, the projects are not part of a structured curriculum
with clearly focused design goals. As a result, students have few
guidelines to evaluate their work, and sometimes they leave an educational
program with a confused sense of what makes one solution better than
another. More often than not, in both educational and commercial
environments, the term "intuitive" is used to cover up the fact that
design values are too ill-defined to state directly. Or students may be
offered reliable but narrow criteria that apply to a part of a project but
not to its overall conception.
WE DO NOT NEED DESIGNERS who can produce
more-attractive interfaces with the same formats of communication. We need
designers who can re-think the processes of communication, exploiting the
capacity of the digital environment to be more responsive to human needs.
Such people must be exposed to many genres of interactive applications, so
that they can develop a repertoire of design strategies.
A curriculum that combined enduring principles with
hands-on practice would offer several advantages. First, it would overcome
existing disciplinary barriers, eliminating the need for students to earn
more than one degree. Second, the process of developing the curriculum
would foster useful collaboration among faculty members across departments
that historically have been quite separate, refreshing practice and (one
hopes) eliminating jargon all around. Third, a principle-based curriculum
would accommodate changes in software and hardware platforms and would
provide students with durable underpinnings for a professional career.
Fourth, a curriculum oriented toward making things would be less
susceptible to fads in media theory than would one limited to analyzing
things already made. Fifth, professionalizing the field would provide a
common design vocabulary for practitioners from different institutions and
different subspecialties. Finally, such changes would result in a
significant advance in professional practice, which would speed the
process of innovation.
How do we get there from here? The solutions
emerging so far are tied to particular innovators who are working to
create new courses or whole new academic programs. They need the advocacy
of colleagues or administrators, and they need the financial support of
industry partners, who stand to benefit from their work. Although
computer-science and social-science departments have more experience with
research programs financed by industry, the humanities and arts are also
promising venues worthy of support. They offer new areas of application
that can enhance the expressiveness of the medium, as well as an expanded
conceptual repertoire. The healthiest programs will be those that draw
equally on the empirical bent of engineers and social scientists and on
the cultural knowledge and expressiveness of humanists and artists.
A network of professional interactive-design
programs, well-grounded in both the humanist and scientific traditions,
could bring us digital art that would capture the human condition in ways
we could not even express before, and digital libraries that would place
human knowledge literally at the fingertips of every child on earth. Of
course, a powerful representational medium could also be put to
destructive uses, fostering isolation and empty consumerism, and turning
education itself into an impersonal global commodity. Both the promises
and the perils make it all the more compelling that we address the task of
educating the professionals who will shape the digital landscape in our
collective human image.
~~~~~~~~
By Janet H.
Murray
Janet H.
Murray is a senior research scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Hamlet on the
Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (The Free Press, 1997).