The X in “IxD”

A funny historical footnote about how old I am: I might be the first person to abbreviate “interaction design” as “IxD” ... but the general usage of the abbreviation does not come from me.

I coined the abbreviation at Alan Cooper’s UX design consulting studio (then “Cooper Interaction Design”) shortly after the second AIGA Advance For Design conference in 1999 which I attended with Cooper and another designer from the studio, Robert Reimann. At that conference I had proposed a mission statement focused on interaction design which did not go over well; the majority of the people at the conference came from classical design backgrounds and favored a more expansive conception of “experience design”. But that proposal of mine got Reimann scratching at a definition of “interaction design” which described our practice. At the whiteboard in those discussions, I started writing “IxD”.

I added the x because we could not use the obvious abbreviation “ID” — that was already in common use for “industrial design”. I was reminded of an old job where we kept very succinct account notes and “transfer” was abbreviated as “txfr”. Plus the letterform of the x implied interaction, just a bit. Plus, of course, the letter x is cool. So I first used the abbreviation in “print” on a post to the Cooper website in September 2004.

Reimann went on to play a significant role in founding the Interaction Design Association in 2005; they used the abbreviation “IxDA” and a definition of “interaction design” which rhymed with the conversations he had led at Cooper. So I long assumed that their usage of “IxD” inherited from ours at Cooper, making my coinage the headwaters of the usage at large.

But Dave Malouf tells the tale of a Yahoo group discussing interaction design in 2003, in which he invented the same abbreviation independently:

After a bit though I thought about this phrase “interaction by design” and because I grew up in a hardware store and lumber/fencing yard the phasing of “2 by 4” (for international folks a piece of word that is 2 inches wide by 4 inches high) is usually written as 2 x 4. So “x” translates to “by”. And voila you have IxD and the x is lower-case to call out that yes we know it is not part of the abbreviation of either of the two words.

Malouf went on to be among the founders of IxDA along with Reimann, so they — and the world — inherited the abbrevation from him, not me. Parallel evolution!