Where’s the graphic designer in the graphical user interface?

Monday 12 January 2009

Where’s the graphic designer in the graphical user interface?

It's been a while since I last posted as I had a paper to research and write. The paper "Where’s the graphic designer in the graphical user interface?" informs my contextual review and the findings within it aid the positioning of myself within interaction design research from a visual communication perspective.

I will only give a summary here and briefly outline my intention for its use.

The paper charts the involvement of graphic designers within the development of graphical user interfaces (GUI) across software and online/offline digital products since the 1970s. This is in order to discover what influence and involvement graphic design, as a discipline, now bears upon interaction design. The paper is limited to 3,000 words and so does not go into the history of GUI development.
The paper can be downloaded here as a pdf.

To support the paper I wish to add here some images that were useful to my research. The paper is intentionally unillustrated as, although it is about a visual medium, I wished the text to position the past, current and future state of graphic designers' involvement before I then move the research onto actual practioners. Therefore the images I am posting below are the starting point for the next paper I propose upon this research. This will then form the first part of my contextual study moving deeper into interaction design literature, before exploring the other areas of the diagram in previous posts.

A History of the GUI Timeline