Member-only story
5 Emerging Themes from the Interaction 20 Conference
A critical look back at this year's IXDA’s Interaction 20 conference in Milan, Italy.
I’ve never given much thought to being a member of the Interaction Design Association. I’ve followed them for years, starting when I was a poor design school student and worked a couple of their events for cash. Now that I’m a real, grown-up designer, I’ve had the pleasure of attending their flagship yearly conference, Interaction. This saw me trekking to Milan last week with my peers to hopefully gain some insight into the state of interaction design.
Interaction 20 built on last year’s Interaction 19 which took place in my hometown of Seattle. Ironically hosted in Amazon’s HQ, right in the middle of what we locals like to call Bezos’s Balls, the 2019 conference focused on the designers’ responsibility to fix everything. Everything. From the political climate to our screentime addiction, the climate crisis, and work-life balance. The general theme I gleaned from last year’s conference was not “Design in the wild” as they styled it, but rather that design was facing a full-blown ethical crisis. I came away with the sentiment that we should be helping regular people instead of making big corporations more money and yet had no clue how to do that while still paying rent.
I went to this year’s rendition, the optimistically themed “A new dawn”, hoping for some more pragmatic ideas about how to move our field forward. And while it took some digging to get the top tips, by the end of the week I was not disappointed. Much like its host city, Milan, the beauty is there albeit slightly beneath the surface.
Here are the top 5 themes I’m taking away from IXDA’s Interaction 20:
The end of the walled garden
The first theme I noticed across several talks was that the clean aesthetic that we designers idolize may not be conducive to a more inclusive future.
The concept was encapsulated by Robert Fabricant’s reference to walled gardens. A…
