Designing Interactions

Digital Technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object — beautiful or utilitarian — but as designing our interactions with it.

In Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and an IDEO founder, tells us stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome.

Moggridge and his interviewees discuss why personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, and why Google is the search engine of choice. Moggridge also tells the story of his own design process with a focus on people and prototypes — how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.

Watch the interviews from Designing Interactions here.

This is one hell of a book.... Part history lesson, part computer science thesis, part design education, part personal design philosophy, it is fascinating, inspirational, occasionally baffling, and often hilarious.

Helen Walters, BusinessWeek

During the past forty years, interaction designers have powerfully transformed the daily lives of billions. Designing Interactions is a deeply knowing, intimate portrayal of these people: who they are, how they think, and precisely what they do.

If you live or work with computers or cell phones—and who among us has any choice about that?—then you owe it to yourself to read this. A labor of love that was years in the making, this classic has no rival in its field.

Bruce Sterling, author of Shaping Things

Purchase

Know someone who might love this book? Here are some options for purchasing Designing Interactions (MIT Press, 2007):

Oct 2007