Interaction designers are the next generation of design professionals, who not only explore visual designs for interactive systems, but also the interactive details. They may design web sites, museum kiosks, mobile phone applications, games and other types of interactive content.
The Euclase project (a collaboration between Brad Myers, Sunyoung Park and Andrew Ko) is exploring who interaction designers are, what types of work they do, and how they think about and express ideas about interactivity. The ultimate goal is to design new programming languages and environments that are more suitable for this kind of design work than any of today's interactive prototyping tools like Adobe Flash or Visual Basic.
In addition to deploying a survey about interaction designers' work and experience, we have also run a lab study to explore interaction designers' descriptions of simple interactive behaviors. For example, in the figure below, a participant viewed a movie portraying changes to the positions of the five circles and was asked to explain the correspondence between the circles and the value in the text box.
