“Interaction design is about shaping digital things for people’s use”
Source: Interaction Design - brief intro | The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
Includes Bill Moggridge quote from his Designing Interactions book:
“I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive solutions in a virtual world, where one could design behaviors, animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects. Like industrial design, the discipline would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service, and strive to create designs that would give aesthetic pleasure as well as lasting satisfaction and enjoyment.
I gave my first conference presentation on the subject in 1984, and at that time I described it as “Soft-face”, thinking of a combination between software and user-interface design […] we went on thinking of possible names until I eventually settled on “interaction design” with the help of Bill Verplank.”
– Moggridge, 2007