What is Interaction Design? (Ivera)

Going through some research articles I had collected I cam across a nicely written press release from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. I love the final two paragraphs from this piece:
“Interactive technologies need a new kind of design, a fusion of sound, graphic and product design, and time-based narrative. Developing this new kind of design will lead to a new aesthetic: one of use and experience as well as of form. Function and information (and perhaps entertainment) converge.
In the combination of communication and interaction design the real needs and possibilities to improve human existence are given a central place.”
Lovely. I’ve included the whole page for safe keeping. Full credit goes to the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.


what is interaction design?
Twenty years ago computers were expensive tools for professionals or gamesmachines for enthusiasts. Today they appear in all aspects of our daily life, frommobile phones to microwave ovens, from exercise bikes to sewing machines. (There are already twelve computer chips for every man, woman and child on the planet.)
When machines were mechanical there was a direct, physical way to interact with them. You wound up your watch and turned a wheel to set its time; clicked a dial to make a kitchen mixer go slower or faster; flipped a switch to sew in reverse, and couldsee the mechanism which allowed this. But a machine controlled by a computer chipis different. It may require us to master menus and modes, and it responds to us, and often to stimuli independent of us, in more complex, less transparent and sometimesdownright mysterious ways. We rely increasingly on such devices, yet our interactionwith them is too often awkward, baffling and lacking in grace and pleasure.
Interaction design fights this trend. While traditional industrial design concentrateson the product