Interaction design beyond the product: Creating technology-enhanced activity spaces

The field of interaction design to date has been predominantly concerned with designing products, that is, devices, systems, and more recently services. A growing body of theoretical and empirical analyses suggests that the scope of interaction design needs to be expanded: An explicit concern of the field should include not only helping designers create better products but also helping people themselves create better environments for their work, learning, and leisure activities. In this article we argue that expanding the scope of interaction design beyond products requires a revision of some of the most central concepts in interaction design, including the notion of the object of design and our understanding of the impact of technologies on human practices. The aim of the article is to explore some of these conceptual challenges and discuss possible ways of dealing with them. We differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic technology-enabled practice transformation, and foreground the need for interaction design research and practice to more directly deal with analysis and construction of technology-enhanced activity spaces. The implications of these notions for the research agenda of interaction design are discussed.