So I’ve been reading about the history of Interaction Design and these two women kept coming up – Ada Lovelace and Lillian Gilbreth. They’re from completely different time periods but both did stuff that was way ahead of their time.
Ada Lovelace is from like the 1800s, which is crazy to think about. She worked on this early computer thing called the Analytical Engine with Charles Babbage. Everyone else was like “oh cool, a big calculator” but she saw something totally different. She wrote about how it could work with symbols and maybe even make music. Like, she was thinking about computers being creative tools when most people couldn’t even imagine what a computer was. That’s basically what we do in IXD now – thinking about technology as something that helps human creativity, not just does math problems.
Lillian Gilbreth came way later and she was really into studying how people actually work. She would just watch people doing their jobs and figure out why they got tired or frustrated. She designed kitchens and tried to make work less awful for people. What’s cool is she really cared about making things work for everyone – not just young healthy guys, but women and older people and people with disabilities too. She was doing user-centered design before anyone called it that.
I guess what strikes me about both of them is they weren’t just thinking about what technology could do, but what people needed. Lovelace imagined computers helping human expression. Gilbreth watched real people struggling with tools and tried to fix that. That feels like what good interaction design should be about – not just making something that works, but making something that actually helps people do what they want to do.