Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Betty Zhang

Prior to studying interaction design, I was creative directing and designing mostly websites and apps. But I started to feel a bit detached from the materiality of the world I was designing for. I was painting a lot on the weekends, mixing oil, acrylic, resin, and all kinds of materials and I enjoyed the feeling of being able to touch the materials I was working with. But while doing graphic design, I never felt that close to my work because I could never physically feel it.

I guess that may be part of the reason I decided to study interaction design. I was looking for something more tangible, and a physical dimension to the digital experiences.

Interaction design taught me about the world around me.

By that I mean I really didn’t know much about how things were made before this. I began to notice this and tried as many workshop tools and machines as I could, just to get a sense of how things could be made and what different materials I could use. Through this, I understood better, how things work, and are made, and what they are made of. I found that by trying and experimenting, you could get a lot of ideas through making. From someone who has never even soldered before, I gradually became more comfortable with physical computing and connecting that digital world with my ideas at the same time as creating physical, tangible outcomes.

Source: http://www.rosslovegrove.com/

During London Design Festival, I went to a talk by Ross Lovegrove and he spoke a lot about design and materials. He said:

If you’re designing today, you should know the anthropological origin of the materials you are using.

Design shouldn’t be so far removed from the raw materials that they use. Even though he was referring to form, sculpture, and materiality in furniture, industrial, and product design, I think this can also be applied to thinking about how to translate digital design into a physical realm. Before designing for the world, you need to know how the system already in place works and why you need to design in the first place.

By learning interaction design, I learned more about the physical and digital world around me and how they work. But additionally, I learned to design better because I understood these systems more.

What interaction design taught me was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What interaction design taught me

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