FeaTure
Hand Waving and the
Real Work of Design
Elizabeth Goodman
UC Berkeley school of Information | egoodman@ischool.berkeley.edu
It’s the second week of a six-week website redesign at a San Francisco design
consultancy. The visiting researcher asks
the senior interaction designer about his
work. He responds, “Oh, I’m not doing
any real work on the project anymore. I’m
just showing up at client meetings and
hand waving.”
July + August 2011
interactions
“Hand waving” is an apt name for
what happens when designers meet
with clients. To make good decisions
about the direction of a project,
clients or other external decision
makers need to understand designers’ proposals, whether they are for
an interactive interface, a product, a
system, or a service. But there’s an
inevitable gap between the existing
representations and the experience
of the future interactivity. Static
wireframes might not effectively
convey how a menu drops down, or
the emotional effect of an animated
transition. Or perhaps a video scenario for a future product family
needs to reference detailed research
on everyday media consumption.
To make matters worse, the goal
of interaction design is often not a
menu drop-down, a transition, or
even a scenario, but rather relationships between varying combinations
of humans and machines that support human goals and activities.
Visual and interaction designers
bridge that gap between representa-
tions and future imagined interac-
tions through hand waving. That is,
they supplement visual representa-
tions with verbal explanations and
evocative body movements. This
hand waving for clients is treated
as a routine part of their jobs, but is
often dismissed as not “real work.”
For many designers, the real work
of interaction design does not hap-
pen in client meetings. Real work
involves collaboratively envisioning
future products and services, then
creating artifacts that represent
them, such as wireframes, videos,
and site architectures. It takes place
in generative, free-flowing team
meetings and in focused, solitary
“heads down” work on computers as
the ideas move from paper sketches
and Post-it notes to InDesign and
Keynote. So, despite the visible
presence of client communication
in project schedules and everyday
conversations, hand waving is often
invisible in accounts of interaction
design as a profession.
