Designing across Substrates
Is interaction design a single material design tradition? In the same way as other areas of craftsmanship have had this single material focus (including knitting, woodcraft, or smiths working with iron) we can ask if interaction design as an area of craftsmanship can be said to be about digital materials as the “single material” of interaction design? At a first glance it is temping to say yes here, not at least if we review the total outcome interaction design projects we can probably say that 99.9% of all interaction design projects are screen-based, and maybe even web-based. Further on, all these projects are made out of code and even the tools, including the programming languages, the scripts and the code compilators are made of digital materials (ultimately bits). In this chapter I take a point of departure in a material-centered approach to interaction design. In particular and in setting out to take a material stance in the construction of an approach to interaction design I ask if contemporary interaction design is restrained to only one material, hence this introduction to this chapter.