On the Point Where Architecture and Interaction Design Meet

Human life is interactive life, in which architecture has long set the stage. (p.xiv)

A key premise of Digital Ground is the relationship between architecture and interaction design. McCullough sees this relationship driven by the shared concerns raised by the growing influence of digital computation in our physical environment. He uses the term pervasive computing to describe this shift.

McCullough paints the emerging relationship as a convergence, with the meeting point found in concerns of embodiment and place.

For interaction designers seeking to know more about context, space, and place, and conversely for architects wishing to understand the roots of interactivity, the principles of embodied predispositions provide increasingly common ground. (p.27)

For architecture, pervasive computing requires a renewed focus on interactivity between people and place.

Interactivity becomes a remedy for architecture, which as a discipline has ignored usability, performance, and inhabitation in its quest for attention-seeking novelties in form. Architecture needs to rejuvenate itself with interaction design. (p.63)

For interaction design, the convergence opens a rich history of theory and principles to draw from when designing for physical space.

The newer field of interaction design benefits as well, for example by becoming more sophisticated about environmental perception. It extends, and does not abandon, previous works of place making. It takes advantage of physical contexts as frames and cues for its social functions. It begins to reflect scale and type in its pursuit of site-specific technology, context-aware systems, and location-based services. It shifts focus from technological novelty to more enduring cultural frameworks. (p.63)

It’s worth noting how McCullough characterizes interaction design as more of a liberal art, rather than just the design of technology. This resonates with how I like to think about design, which isn’t surprising as he credits Richard Buchanan in the book’s acknowledgements, who is former head of the design school where I studied at Carnegie Mellon University.

I’m quoting him at length here because I think he gives one of the better “design as liberal art” elevator pitches:

The more that artifice permeates life, the more design becomes an essential liberal art. Because technology affects so much of what we do, even who we think we are, its design involves judgement and appreciation. Thus interaction design increasingly takes the form of a practice.

As a practice, design means more than making things look pretty, although good form is usually welcome. It also means more that making things usable, since something quite usable might nevertheless be useless. It does not flood the world with all technically possible gadgets and distractions. What we choose to build matters just as much as how it looks, or how well we can make it operate. This choice is largely a social process; proposing what to do involves negotiation. Part advocacy, part virtuoso authorship, part ethnography, part engineering science, and part architecture to live by, interaction design needs conscientious multidisciplinary discourses. (p.148)

This more expansive description of design is what allows the author to form the bridge between architecture and interaction design. My thought is that it also allows us to make bridges to many other disciplines, creating new opportunities for design.