• About This project
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section One /
  Understanding Interaction Design
• Section Two /
  Connecting People, Emotions and Technology
• Section Three /
  The Rhetorical Nature of Interaction Design
• Section Four /
  Challenges Facing Interaction Design in Industry
• In Summary
• Glossary
• References

About This Project

Thoughts on Interaction Design was published in 2007 by Brown Bear LLC. With a print run of only 1000 copies, this book quickly sold out and is now out of print. There are no plans to republish the work in a printed format. However, the book was originally printed to educate, pursuade, and debate the merits of a particular point of view; as such, this site exists to extend that dialogue through the presentation of the entire book in an open and digital format.

About The Contributors

This text was produced due to the contributions and hard work from a number of different individuals, as described below:

Jon Kolko

Jon Kolko is a Senior Design Analyst at frog design, in Austin, Texas. He has worked extensively in both the professional and academic worlds of interaction design, manipulating complicated technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients and educating future interaction designers to do the same. His work has extended into the worlds of supply chain management, demand planning, pricing and configuration, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Palm, and other leaders of the Global 2000. The common underlying theme of these problems and projects was the creation of a solution that was useful, usable, and desirable.

His present research investigates the process of Design, with a focus on the use of Information Architecture during the Synthesis phase of a design problem. This includes the role of visual data organization during requirement mapping and definition, as well as educational structures for acquiring these Information Architecture and Design skills.

Ellen Beldner

Ellen Beldner is a Designer at Google. She has been creating Interaction Design solutions for major corporations since 2000, when she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a focus in HCI and professional writing.

Uday Gajendar

Uday Gajendar is an interaction designer in Silicon Valley, whose work has spanned financial software, license management systems, creative tools, and most recently new consumer concepts. Having previously worked at Oracle, Adobe, frog design, and now a private digital design studio, Uday continues to evolve his place within industry. As an active member of the design community, Uday has spoken at venues for IDSA, DMI, and the annual Information Architecture Summit, on topics such as beauty, globalization, and design strategy.

Chris Connors

Chris Connors is currently employed at Apple. Prior to working at Apple, Chris worked at NASA with a focus on designing future mission support tools for planning robotic activity during surface operations on Mars. Chris also has an extensive background with Trilogy Software in Austin, Texas, where he designed enterprise software products for the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Computer, and Automotive industries.

Justin Petro

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Justin is Principal of Thinktiv in Austin, Texas. Prior to this, Justin was the Director of User Experience at Design Edge. At Design Edge, Justin worked to solve strategic business problems with user-centric design solutions. Justin has worked with Dell, Trilogy, Maya, Siemens, and Merrill Lynch, and has been awarded patents in both hardware and software design.