The X in “IxD”

A funny historical footnote about how old I am:

I am probably 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.

Who put the X in IxD?

Well, I did of course. So now about 1/2 of you hate me and the other half have no feelings at all on the topic.

So the year was 2003. A ragtag group of designers were talking about the world of interaction design. About 600 of us were talking on a single yahoo group. There was definitely a lot of navel gazing going on, but it was fun.

At some point the topic of an acronym came up. I don’t know why exactly, but my struggling memory remembers it something like this. Someone called interaction design “ID”, then I stood up and said, what do you mean? Industrial Design, Interior Design, Information Design, and — my favorite — Intelligent Design? I brought up the problem that ID doesn’t mean one thing so we probably should figure out what our clear acronym should be.

As context, some design studios were already dealing with this issue, especially those in Industrial Design. Ideo for example may still call Interaction Design “IAD”, where the A is obviously for “action”. It could have worked, but I always hated the Washington DC airport that uses the same acronym, so I was possibly being selfish and short sighted.

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.

So now IxD is clearly different from ID whether you mean Industrial, Interior, Information, or even Intelligent Design.

---

UPDATE: @miniver (Jonathan Korman) informed me via twitter that independently and unbeknownst to me, he started using the X at Cooper about 3 years before me.

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!

What about the X in “UX”?

I have seen some discussions in which people who don’t know this story make the reasonable, incorrect guess that “IxD” references “experience” as in “user experience” as in “UX”.

Might it run the other way? Is user experience abbreviated “UX” instead of “UE” in reference to “IxD”?

I cannot find an origin for that abbrevation. Crossover seems plausible; though Don Norman coined the expression “user experience” in 1996, I do not recall seeing the abbreviation until at least a few years after “IxD” caught on.

But I doubt it. There was a culture gap between “interaction designers” and “(user) experience designers” in those days. Whoever coined and spread “UX” may not have even seen the “IxD” abbreviation.

At that time, there were a lot of xes around. Stuff like the X-Games and action movies used the x to reference “extreme”, a buzzword describing a pervasive (vulgar) style of that era. I was not alluding to that with my coinage of “IxD”, but no doubt it gave me a subconscious nudge. Likely the same happened with “UX”. More parallel evolution?