Kick-Off IxDA Local Chapter Düsseldorf

German Leon and myself kicked off the IxDA local gathering yesterday evening. We did choose the Bazzar Café for our first meetup. It did work out really well, we gathered around plenty of people at that really nice, cozy and authentic café bar downtown Düsseldorf. We have not been able to attract folks from Cologne, though I would assume that was due to the timing and distance. However, we might choose to head down to Cologne for our second meetup in about two months.

Anyhow, we happened to have a really interesting discussion about the purpose of those local IxDA meetups. From an organization point of view, IxDA wants to foster a community of people that choose to come together to support the intention of advancing and improving the human condition which is challenged by poor experiences. IxDA relies on individual initiative, contribution and sharing. The discussion went way further by actually pointing at the distinction between Interaction Design and User Experience. As you may have noticed, I have written “challenged by poor experiences” - this would point to the notion of Experience Design rather than to Interaction Design in particular. By accident, this discussion was a major topic being discussed at the UXcamp 09 in Berlin last weekend. At the end of the discussion among a whole bunch of people from several professions (though mainly the same industry) the main thread was not precisely nailed down. The consensus tended toward User Experience Design as the major description of what everbody does on a daily basis, and Interaction Design just being a smaller aspect or contributor to the whole experience. Although the discurs yesterday was rather short in contrast to the one at UXcamp09 we ended up getting to the same conclusion, though lacking some action points for everybody act upon. This was different to UXcamp. People started to post and blog about the discurs and its major outcome. From a long term perspective this this will be a valid and necessary development for and within the industry.
Just for the sake of a contrary argument, people at both events became conserned that the term User Experience Design will be quite a lot tougher to sell as a holistic service to potential clients or industries.