Handheld Communication Interfaces

Design, Development, and Process

R. Brian Stone, Assistant Professor | The Ohio State University

Introduction

Over the years, it has been design education’s purpose to focus on developing the skills
necessary to design and develop the physical form of objects. The profession is largely
focused on the creation of form, with an understanding that form has the power to evoke
interaction. With the growing complexity and increased use of ‘responsive’ threedimensional
products such as cellular phones, PDAs, and digital cameras, designers must
shift their focus from design as simply a form-giving process, to design as a process of
enabling interaction [1]. The way we use a product is as important as what that product can
do, or what it looks like, thus the issue of what an object means or causes one to do with it
has moved to the foreground.

This shift in focus begs the need for curriculum development and course work in interaction
and interface design. In July 1999, leading interaction designers met in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, under the leadership of the American Institute of Graphic Arts to discuss the
changing nature of design responsibility in a networked [wireless] economy. The conclusion
reached by this group was that design is increasingly less about creating objects and more
about creating experiences, and that this experiential nature of interactive communication
and products will only accelerate under rapid technological development [2]. Therefore, a
fundamental shift from designing ‘object and designer’ centered products to ‘experience and
user’ centered projects must occur.

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