Fancy some navel gazing? Purely in professional terms of course. What became quite obvious during the Potsdam Forum was that the profession of interaction design is still on its very own soul searching trip. Which is definitely a good thing since it brings a lot of excitement with it and sets our minds free, but it can easily appear as a weakness – not only to the outside world.

While the likes of Gesche Joost from Deutsche Telekom Labs is battling Scientists from other disciplines for being taken seriously by using tatoos, Tony Dunne renamed his course at the Royal College of Art from ‘Interaction Design’ to ‘Design Interactions’.

Not such a long time ago, the same course had been renamed by Irene McAra-McWilliam when she took over from Gillian Crampton-Smith: from ‘Computer Related Design’ to ‘Interaction Design’. One could think that her (McAra-McWilliam’s) dismal performance as head of that course prompted Tony Dunne to change the name again.

After years in Computer Related Design Research and teaching on Ron Arad’s course ‘Design Products’ (read not ordinary ‘Product Design’) where he experienced the evolvement of that discipline and by actively contributing to it pushing into the domain of then Computer Related Design, seeing the natural progression of Industrial Design, Tony Dunne obviously took it on him to start a process of redefinition of this prestigious course.

In changing the words around, it becomes an imperative - the focus shifts from design to interaction. In his talk Tony Dunne stressed the importance to pre-empt even the prototype stage of technological advances and developments in finding approaches and designs for potential products.

Not only to reinstate the driving power of design as such but also that only by thinking of how a revolutionising product of the future looks, how it behaves, how it is made usable for us, we enter the state which allows us to understand the implications of these new developments – hence allow us to be critical of those. And there is a strong emphasis on being critical.

While this is a very important point to make, the question remains what the rules of engagement shall be for Interaction Design with emerging technologies.

Works by RCA students Michiko Nitta and Michael Burton the day before, were a perfect example of the dilemma this approach brings with it. While these projects are highly engaging, show interesting thinking paths, are an evidence of strong, individual opinionated minds behind it, the proposals do not convince – they’re not even meant to do that. They are meant mainly to provoke by pointing to real existing problems, like the logistics of information or challenges in the future, like the increasing weakness of our immune system due to over sanitisation.

Tony Dunne with Fiona Raby themselves struggle too to show some more flesh on these bones. One of their latest projects deals with robots, where they follow the Japanese Approach where robots will become own entities in our homes, nevertheless they don’t grant them the multifunctional butler mentality often affiliated. They rather isolate certain behaviours attributed to certain objects (read robots).

In order to make my point I want to pick one of these objects, which was a robot in ring shape, which would identify electromagnetic fields and move to the part of the room where the least intense electromagnetic field would be. One then could step into the ring knowing that one would be exposed to the least intensity.

While the notion of electromagnetic fields is reaching back quite some time in their work, the latest offspring fails to convince. The approach to use an electronic device to protect you from electronic outfall the very device is responsible for as well, is a bitter tasting paradox and stops short of finding solutions much more thrilling – it simply highlights implications which are known for some time.

Of course one needs to be careful not to be overcritical of an approach which needs time and support by discourse, otherwise one might shut off a branch of interaction design which could be very valuable in contributing to interaction design research – or however you wish to name it.