One of the challenges for the interaction designer today is the move of value in the West from the manufacture of products to the provision of services—from the material to the immaterial.
With recent developments in technologies for ubiquitous access to the internet and increasingly sophisticated software for service support and billing, a whole range of new services become possible. And the devices we use are increasingly conceived not as products in themselves but as the interface, the access point, to the services behind them. In Italy, for instance, Ariston provides a laundry service—the washing machine is free, you pay only for the washes you do; and in Britain some mobile phone contracts provide the phone free: you pay only for the service. The job of the designer is now not just to design the device, or the software, and the way you interact with it, but to design the whole experience of the service so it is coherent and satisfying. Though the shift from product to service brings an increasing dematerialisation, happily, with sensor and wireless technology, there is now the potential for an increasingly rich physicality in the ways we interact with them.