Interaction Guaranteed

Graeme Aymer

Aymer, G. (2001). Interaction Guaranteed. Create Online. Issue 10, March. p32-33

“Originally I was a graphic designer. (…) I thought graphic designers ought to be involved in designing software. That was 1983. Now they are involved, but its taken nearly 20 years for it to happen. That’s really how I started.” (Dr Gillian Crampton Smith quoted p32)

“The danger is, if you use the words ‘interactive design’, its as if the design is interactive. But if we think of graphic design, that applies both to what something looks like and to the design strategy of how you structure this information. And I think interaction design is similar. It’s not just designing the individual interactions that people have with software; it’s designing what a package is and what it does, and then designing what it will be like.” (Dr Gillian Crampton Smith quoted p33)

I found this article profiling Gillian Crampton Smith, ex-director of Ivrea. It was a brilliant find as she discusses not only graphic design and interaction design but also because the revelation that she was a graphic designer, a fact that was extremely useful to my first paper .

The Xerox "Star": A Retrospective

Jeff Johnson and Teresa L. Roberts, U S WEST Advanced Technologies
William Verplank, IDTwo
David C. Smith, Cognition, Inc.
Charles Irby and Marian Beard, Metaphor Computer Systems
Kevin Mackey, Xerox Corporation

Johnson, J., Roberts, T.L., Verplank, W., Smith, D.C., Irby, C., Beard, M.
and Mackey, K. (1989) The Xerox "Star": A Retrospective. [online] (accessed on the World Wide Web 4/1/2009 http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retrospect/)

"One of the most obvious contributions of good graphic design is to provide appropriate visual order and focus to the screen. For example, intensity and contrast, when appropriately applied, draw the user's attention to the most important features of the display.”

"Screen graphics designed by computer programmers will not satisfy customers. The Star designers recognized their limitations in this regard and hired the right people for the job."

This interesting paper about the development of the Xerox "Star" computer GUI in the early 1980s, discussed the role played by graphic designers in the development of its GUI. Above are two quotes that I found very useful.