The Emergent Field of Interaction Architecture and the Future of Work

My friend proposed a simple game to our group: each person would put their favorite song from the past month into a shared playlist. Then we would go around, listen to each song, and talk about it.

Each conversation was different; some people spoke about the song’s beat or rhythm, others focused on the song’s parallels to their lives. This game provided a framework that built closeness between us in a way watching television or drinking at a bar usually does not facilitate.

People often engage in designed interactions. Board games use dice and cards to create new patterns of competition and collaboration. Speed-dating, meet-ups, and conferences facilitate meetings with the help of a central coordinating body. In recent years, new forms of entertainment blur the lines between event and game. In Pokemon Go kids collect creatures on their phones in digital space in a way that creates new in-person connections. In the New York-based play Sleep No More, actors mingle amongst participants and the play is impacted by participants’ actions. The coming years will bring an explosion of these kinds of cross-platform, group games as digital technology becomes even more integrated into physical spaces.

But the game my friend posed was subtly different. There was no defined end game, no coordinator. We were just friends in a room that came to the simple agreement that for an hour or two, we were going to all interact in a specific way. We constructed a group dynamic purely to enjoy the interactions that emerged from it.

Increasingly I believe there will be a field that combines event planning, game design, and performance art into a field called interaction architecture. Interaction architects use physical and digital tools to coordinate people in different patterns for fun, shared experiences. Interaction architects might use different mediums (art, events, games, landscape design), but are all doing so with the goal of altering in-person interactions and experiences.

Machines will likely take over a large percentage of jobs in the next twenty years. In this vacuum people currently have few ways to organize their lives and provide meaning to their years. They might devolve into passive television consumers and online combatants. We have tried to find an answer to the question of “what will we do?” but this view subtly suggests that there is one new type of interaction that we will engage in. Rather than attempt to find one answer, we should encourage the creation of a field whose focus is the exploration of the many ways people can interact. With this field we can create jobs of group game designers, interaction artists, experiential architects, and many others whose focus is the design of in-person experiences that create engaged, connected, and happy people in a just, sustainable society.

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