Design & Emotion Blog
// Learn from the experts
Just found that Putting People First posted a link to a book review by Andrew Otwell. Coincidentally I just got “Designing Interactions” by Bill Moggridge a couple of days ago.
I browsed through it quickly but haven’t had the time yet to read it thoroughly and properly. My first impression was very positive, it seems to be a very diverse collection of interviews with many experts from the field that the author collected and conducted in the last couple of years. A DVD with short pieces of the interviews is also provided.
A few quotes from the review by Andrew:
“…an important book, the first attempt at a real cultural history of the field of interaction design, from its beginnings with Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, through current work designing for ubiquitous computing.”
“Don Norman’s jacket blurb says: “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.â€? But the IDEO bias in Designing Interactions should bother all readers. Yes, IDEO played a significant role in shaping some of the major products in interaction design history. But at times it’s as if Moggridge has included a section or interview specifically to give more ink for the company, which hardly needs help marketing itself.”
“It’s interesting to compare Designing Interactions with Dan Saffer’s recent book with a slightly different title: Designing for Interaction. Both authors use interviews, even with some of the same people (Larry Tesler and Brenda Laurel), but are limited to three or four questions and tightly-edited answers. (I’ll also admit that a couple of Dan’s subjects are friends of mine.) Designing for Interaction’s interviews are short sidebars that expand on each chapters’ main idea, without feeling distracting. That’s an appropriate and useful use of that kind of research.”
“Unfortunately,” he says, it “suffers from some very serious flaws,” and he hopes “that all readers will bring an especially critical eye to it.“
Ok, that I’ll do. Hopefully I will soon have the time to read the book completely. I will post my final opinion here.
In the meantime:
Read Andrews review here >>>
AndrewVisitor
Thanks for the link,and I’m glad you liked the review. My first impressions were also very good, and I have to admit, I’ve been really excited about this book since I first heard about it probably more than a year ago. I do hope people will read the whole thing–it’s a beast and took me days and days to get through, and I really had to force myself through some of the lamest parts. But I would like to hear other people’s responses as well.