When I was at CMU, I remember we have spent a lot of time to understand and discuss what Interaction Design is and what it means to us. Interaction Design is a new discipline, and there are so many different labels for Interaction Designer out there, Information Architect, UI Designer, UX Designer just to name a few; and even though the designer title is the same, the work scope and expectations could be very different at companies. I remember the last assignment of the Graduate Seminar course was to write a paper to describe what Interaction Design means to us. I do not remember what I wrote exactly, however I had a lot of questions and some of them still left unanswered. One of the things I query is that If “Human Centered Design” is about designing to meet human needs, isn’t that we should have included psychology and sociology in our curriculum?
Affective computing written by Rosalind W. Picard is one of my favorite books and it has much influence on my design philosophy. The Affective Computing research conducted at the the Media Lab “combines engineering and computer science with psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sociology, education, psychophysiology, value-centered design, ethics, and more“, which are the qualities I believe Design Leaders should have. Human Center Design should be about providing solutions to human beings in respect to body, mind and spirit; I believe we designers have the responsibility to help shaping the society and the world we want to live in. I have been doing some soul searching and seeking for projects I am passionate about, hopefully I will nail down some ideas and figure out what’s next. As O’Reilly says, it is about time to “Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy.”