Description:

Graphic designers are exposed to the history of their field during art school. Fashion designers remix the historical trends that seem to recur like clockwork. And it's unthinkable that a practicing architect wouldn't understand the historical foundations of their field. But interaction designers, sadly, rarely have historical perspective because most people working in the field today didn't have formalized training. As a result, we don't know where the principles of how we interact with computers and technology come from. How often are we reinventing the wheel? How often are we ignoring fundamentals? In this workshop, we'll try to remedy that. Over the course of three hours, we'll explore how human/machine interaction has evolved from buttons and switches to icons and OK, from punch cards and command line interactions to graphical user interfaces and touch technology. Workshop participants will see videos of early products and systems in action, hear quotes from key thought leaders in the field, and walk away with a better understanding of how our discipline developed before we called it "interaction design."