Welcome
Our cover story puts an explicit emphasis on
what has been an implicit theme of interactions
over the past two years: the desire to improve
the world around us through interaction design.
Hugh Dubberly, along with his co-authors Rajiv
Mehta, Shelley Evenson, and Paul Pangaro,
describes the necessity to reframe healthcare
toward a personal, self-managed perspec-
tive. The authors acknowledge that “improving
healthcare is a wicked problem,” yet they offer
hope for a solution by highlighting a shift toward
a whole-person, contextually sensitive approach
to health and wellness. This new approach shifts
emphasis from a top-down approach of caregiver
as expert, to a bottom-up style of self-manage-
ment and education.
Emily Pilloton’s work at Project H also tackles
these wicked problems, and the culture of design
has increasingly embraced her focus on humani-
tarian work. Not only is her book reviewed
in this issue, but we also offer Pilloton’s own
thoughts about designing for impact. As she pre-
scribes, “Because social issues are systemic, our
community-based work must not only be local
and long-term, but also widespread and perva-
sive, occurring at varying scales, for multiple
programs, and for a variety of clients.”
These social issues require new skills from
the designers who choose to tackle them; some
key articles within describe these new skills,
methods, approaches, and philosophies. Kristina
Halvorson addresses the importance of con-
tent strategy in shaping decisions and creating
actionability; Paula Bach’s work emphasizes the

• Richard Anderson

• Jon Kolko

Interactions:
Business, Culture, and Society
emerging role of designers in the creation of
open source software; and Eli Blevis notes that
design education will need to change to embrace
practices of sustainability—and he offers some
pragmatic advice for shaping such curricula.
We find culture at the heart of many of these
new skills, methods, and theories, and so we
offer a broad view of culture through other excel-
lent articles. Gary Marsden highlights the role
of culture in designing for (and with) developing
countries, using the example of social media
in Africa. A more corporate view of culture is
presented by Arnie Lund, who speaks to some
of the challenges of introducing design into the
engineering world of Microsoft. And Mark Hicks
presents ways to introduce creativity into a pro-
cess through co-design, working with end users
to drive innovative thinking in product develop-
ment.
The process of design is spreading into new
areas of society and business, and as it does, our
work gets more complicated and more rewarding.
From the details of our interfaces to the focus of
our efforts, this issue describes the complexity of
the changing landscape of interactions. We hope
you find the work rewarding, and these pieces
equally informative and entertaining.
—Jon Kolko
[e-mail]
doi: 10.1145/1744161.1744162
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0500 $10.00