Product Description

A pioneer in interaction design tells the stories of designers who changed the way people use everyday things in the digital era, interviewing the founders of Google, the creator of The Sims, the inventors and developers of the mouse and the desktop, and many others. Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object - beautiful or utilitarian - but as designing our interactions with it. In "Designing Interactions", award-winning designer, Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider's viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews - including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop - have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology. Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm's handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO - how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology. "Designing Interactions" is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8465 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 766 pages

Interfaces (quarterly newsletter of the Human-Computer Interaction group of the British Computer Society), Spring 2007 (book review and author interview)
"This is a book that people will want to buy, and will potentially open a new audience for our work. In addition, its design alone will alter people's perceptions about our community - I would suggest in a very positive way.
Behind the gloss is some important and rare content. I would say this book will do more for HCI than a bucket load of Nielsen diatribes. While the HCI community has been doing some soul searching, this book neatly encapsulates what we do - research and design - and makes it relevant to industry and consumers alike."

The Architectural Review, April 2007 (in "Comment" section by Francis Duffy):
"Designing Interactions provides a cornucopia of wonderful data on this rapidly developing frontier in the form of 40 interviews with [Moggridge's] industry heroes, the pioneers who have found ways to make the power of the computer accessible not just to techies and nerds but to everyone. The interviews brilliantly illuminate the series of advances through which user access to computer technology has been, and continues to be, revolutionised ... What can architects learn from interaction design? Can the design of a building really be compared to the design of a new handheld device? Moggridge's book has persuaded me that there is everything to be learned from the way in which manufacturers and developers of new electronic products, both hardware and software, search systematically for feedback from users ... Designing interactions is the key to rethinking both the city and the office building."

About the Author
Award-winning designer Bill Moggridge is a founder of IDEO, one of the most successful design firms in the world and one of the first to integrate the design of software and hardware into the practice of industrial design. He has been Visiting Professor in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, Lecturer in Design at the London Business School, member of the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, and is currently Consulting Associate Professor in the Joint Program in Design at Stanford University.

Customer Reviews

Packed with awesomeness
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

Good Content
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

One of the best
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.