Designing Interactions (Hardcover)

by Bill Moggridge (Author) "Who would choose to point, steer, and draw with a blob of plastic as big and clumsy as a bar of soap?..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Designing Interactions offers multiple interfaces in its own right. It's not just a well-designed, nicely indexed book, with a heft that strains the tendons (the back of my review copy cracked after only a few hours of gentle use), but also an enclosed DVD with interviews, and a website (designinginteractions.com) that includes a weekly downloadable chapter. There's an inherent lesson in this arrangement, which is the value of choice. The very randomness of Moggridge's archive shows the truest quality of good interaction design: personality."
— I.D. Magazine

"An engaging, informative, and enjoyable history of interaction design that helps us appreciate the contributions of some incredible people who shaped this corner of the design field. What fun!"
—Dan Boyarski, Professor and Head, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University

"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

"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.com

"This will be the book—the book that summarizes how the technology of interaction came into being and prescribes how it will advance in the future. Written by the designer who was there, who helped make it happen, who pioneered the digital revolution. Essential, exciting, and a delight for both eyes and mind."
—Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University, author of Emotional Design

Product Description
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, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider's viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews—including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop—have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.

Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm's handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.

Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.

Interviews with:
Bill Atkinson, Durrell Bishop, Brendan Boyle, Dennis Boyle, Paul Bradley, Duane Bray, Sergey Brin, Stu Card, Gillian Crampton Smith, Chris Downs, Tony Dunne, John Ellenby, Doug Englebart, Jane Fulton Suri, Bill Gaver, Bing Gordon, Rob Haitani, Jeff Hawkins, Matt Hunter, Hiroshi Ishii, Bert Keely, David Kelley, Rikako Kojima, Brenda Laurel, David Liddle, Lavrans Løvlie, John Maeda, Paul Mercer, Tim Mott, Joy Mountford, Takeshi Natsuno, Larry Page, Mark Podlaseck, Fiona Raby, Cordell Ratzlaff, Ben Reason, Jun Rekimoto, Steve Rogers, Fran Samalionis, Larry Tesler, Bill Verplank, Terry Winograd, and Will Wright

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 766 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262134748
• ISBN-13: 978-0262134743
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #12,546 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

144 of 154 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The first history of interaction design, November 5, 2006

By	Andrew Otwell "heyotwell" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

(I originally gave this book a more positive review. Amazon won't let me change the star rating. I give this book TWO stars, not four.)

This book is fairly impressive at first glance. Seven-hundred plus pages, adequately footnoted, and nicely designed. I can't imagine anyone in the field of interaction design not enjoying cracking open Moggridge's book.

But "Designing Interactions" isn't quite what I thought it would be, and my first optimistic impressions were terribly wrong. It is, as Bruce Sterling's blurb describes it, "a labor of love." It's really "The History of Designing Interactions." More specifically, it's "The History of how Bill Moggridge, his company IDEO, and A Few Other People Mostly in California Designed Interactions." It's something of a hagiography--biographies of designer-saints, whose every effort was nothing less than beautiful, innovative, useable and useful. Failures, missteps, or significant-but-ugly designs (Windows 3.1 gets about a sentence) are minimized. That makes it feel like something of a whitewash.

It actually reminds me a lot of "The Art of Unix Programming" in its combination of cultural and technological history, mixed with practical sections. But where the people in "The Art of Unix Programming" come across as modest smart people, sort of tinkering along inventing an entire paradigm, Moggridge's subjects are sort of bathed in this golden California glow of eternal optimistic technophilia; it's not that the design of buttons and menus isn't a moral, cultural, and aesthetic imperative (cause it is), but in Moggridge's text it just all feels a little...inevitable. It's also historically dubious. Moggridge doesn't use interviews well, and they seem to be basically his only research here. Relying on the memories of his old design buddies is an extraordinarily sloppy way to write history. Other evidence for claims and facts is sadly lacking. Readers need to bring a very skeptical eye to the content here.

It's also depressingly full of IDEO work, IDEO employees, and IDEO methods. Which would almost be ok if Moggridge were more transparent about his own role as founder and current senior employee of that company. As it is, the conflict of interest here is a pretty crass. (After all, Moggridge stands to personally and professionally benefit from defining "interaction design" entirely around his own business, right?)

But I think if you do this kind of work, you'll enjoy the histories of the mouse, the menu, or the Palm Pilot, and seeing lots of sketches and diagrams and screenshots. It *is* kind of cool to see stuff like Bill Atkinson's sketches of the Apple Lisa. It also feels quite current, and there are good sections on mobile devices, patterns of technology adoption, play, service design, critical design, and ubiquitous computation. Though the downside of this breadth is that the whole thing feels like a grab bag approach. There are more than a few genuinely disappointing parts: the chapter on the internet is pretty poor, basically equating "the Internet" with Google and a couple of long-gone fancy web navigation experiments. It's a chapter that's little more than a Silicon Valley courtier's homage to the boy kings Larry and Sergey. What's this doing in a book on interaction design, Bill?

It's interesting to compare "Designing Interactions" with Dan Saffer's new book with a slightly different title: "Designing for Interaction." Both books use interviews, but Saffer's are short sidebars, Moggridge's book is *mostly* interviews. Though Moggridge's last chapter is a practical section, about the length of Saffer's whole book, Saffer *still* manages to cover a lot more of the nuts and bolts, day to day work of interaction design.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terribly Self-Indulgent, March 25, 2008

By	L. Delano - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a terribly self-indulgent view of interaction design. There is no real analysis in this book or critical thinking. It's mostly a collection of simple stories from companies or efforts that Moggridge likes. There is no real theory offered here, only anecdotes. It's also a very Silicon Valley-centric view of the world. If you are looking for a partial history of interesting "interaction" design efforts, this book may be for you. Though, perhaps, not at the price it sells for.

47 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bill Moggridge's Masterpiece, October 29, 2006

By	Robert I. Sutton "Stanford Professor and Author" (Stanford University, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I made the mistake of opening the Amazon box yesterday. It contained Bill Moggridge's brand new 766 page book Designing Interactions. I have several talks to prepare and a bunch of other stuff to do, but I forgot all about them once I started reading the book. Bill has been at ground zero of the design thinking movement for 30+ years, starting has own industrial engineering firm years and then joined David Kelley, Mike Nuttall to form IDEO, as what was then the first full service design firm, and has now broadened to become an innovation firm that helps companies develop innovative products, processes, customer experiences and organizational designs. I've known Bill for about a decade and have always been touched by both his grace and brilliance, and range of skills -- and they are all on display in this beautiful book. Bill is perhaps best known as the designer of the Grid, the first laptop computer in 1981, but that is just one of the many, many designs he has contributed to.

This book --using interviews with many of the most influential and important people and their stories in the product design and innovation world over the past 30 years or so -- demonstrates what design thinking is and how great people do it. Read it, studying it, talk about it. I've read a lot of books on creativity and design, I've try to study it, teach it, apply it myself, but while there is a lot of good stuff out there, this is the masterpiece, the top of the pops.

If you are going to read one book on how to do creative work in the real world, this is it. The 700 images, the stories, the writing are all relentlessly beautiful and instructive.

Not only that, the process that Bill used to create the book also is an example of the design thinking and action at its best -- the process and the product demonstrate why Bill is known as one of the most skilled designers in the world (and I mean both technically and socially skilled). I had heard about the book a bit from Bill, as I was amazed to hear that he was -- with help from key people at IDEO and his social network -- producing everything in the book himself, writing all the words, doing all the interviews with 40 or so designers and innovators who are the main focus of the book -- everyone from Doug Englebart (inventor of the computer mouse) to Google's Larry Page to Wil Wright (creator of the Sims), to designing the layout and cover, to using desktop publishing and video editing software to himself to bring it all together. In fact, I confess that although I have made it through the text, I haven't even looked at the DVD yet that is included with the book, and as I've implied, Bill also produced.

In the name of full disclosure, I am an IDEO Fellow and have known and admired Bill for along time. But I know and admire lots of people who write books on creativity and innovation. This is the masterpiece in my view. This book is published by MIT Press -- which has had few of any books at the top of the best-seller list in its history -- and it is about 500 pages longer than most books that are slated to be hit sellers. But it deserves to be a best seller given the current clamoring for creativity and innovation throughout the world. Designing Interactions only costs $26.37 on Amazon -- and it has more useful information and inspiration than any 10 other books you are likely to buy that are vaguely related to the subject -- and they don't have a DVD.

Now I have to go back to my other chores and resist the temptation to watch the DVD for another couple days. It is 100 minutes!

P.S. Checkout the Designing Interactions Website -- you can see video clips from the DVD there and read a sample chapter. The URL is http://www.designinginteractions.com/