I got a week with Bill Moggridge’s “Designing Interactions”(huge thanks to Prof. Baumann) and it felt like sitting in a long, honest conversation with the people who built the interfaces we now use everyday. The interviews and case stories walk through the shift from early graphical interfaces and the mouse, all the way to mobile devices, games, and speculative futures, and you start to see how every design decision quietly teaches users how to think about technology. For my thesis on ethical design and digital footprints, this book is a reminder that interaction design is never neutral; it always shapes what users notice, what they ignore, and how aware they are of the traces they leave behind. Some chapters really highlight the importance of how design shapes how humans leave digital footprints and it really opened further curiosities.
The early GUI stories around the mouse and the desktop metaphor are a good reminder of how much power metaphors have. Designers were not only drawing icons; they were defining how people imagine “working” inside a computer, using windows, folders, and simple interactions. Translating this to my thesis, I realize current privacy banners, “activity” views, and history logs are also metaphors that teach people what a digital footprint is. If the interface hides most of the trail or wraps it in vague language, users will assume there is not much going on. That is already a design decision, not an accident.
The chapter “From the Desk to the Palm” is where the digital footprint issue becomes impossible to ignore. These chapters walk through how interactions left the desk and moved into pockets, hands, and everyday routines. Once devices became mobile and always connected, data stopped being something people “entered” and became something that is constantly generated in the background. For my work, this underlines a key ethical challenge: people are not always consciously “using” a product when their data is being collected. Ethical interaction design must therefore find ways to surface what is happening in the background without overwhelming people.
Then “Adopting Technology” stories highlight the negotiation between what is technically possible and what is acceptable or understandable for users. Designers keep running into constraints and tradeoffs, and those constraints end up shaping the final product. I see a clear parallel here with privacy-by-design: if ethical constraints and data-minimization rules are built into the process early, they can shape the interaction in the same way as technical limits. This helps me think of ethics not as an add-on checklist, but as part of the design brief.
Also, the “People and Prototypes” chapter gives me a practical hook. He describes a process grounded in talking to people, building quick prototypes, and iterating under constraints. For my thesis, I can borrow this structure and explicitly define “ethical constraints” around data collection, consent, and transparency, then test them through prototypes. Instead of just saying “this design is ethical,” I can show how those constraints influenced specific interaction choices.
There is also value in the more future-focused material. The speculative and “alternative nows” work shows designers imagining other ways technology could fit into society, not all of them comfortable. This inspires me to think about what a future interface would look like if it treated digital footprints as something to be clearly seen and managed, rather than hidden. For example, could a product visualize data trails in real time, or let users rehearse different “data futures” depending on the choices they make?
For my thesis, this impulse leads to three concrete moves: first, to treat metaphors and mental models as central when designing how people understand their digital traces. Second, to adopt a “people, prototypes, constraints” process that includes ethical and privacy constraints from the start. Third, to use speculative scenarios to question today’s defaults and imagine interfaces that actively help people manage their footprints instead of quietly expanding them.
Some relevant accompanying links:
Here is a link to the publisher’s page for “Designing Interactions”, which gives a clear overview of the structure, chapters, and focus of the book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/655668/designing-interactions-by-bill-moggridge/9780262134743
For another perspective, this review summarises the key themes and interviews in the book and helps me cross-check which parts are most relevant to interaction design practice and my thesis:
https://www.pdma.org/page/review_designing_int
Lastly, this introduction to interaction design offers a concise explanation of how interaction design shapes user behavior and expectations, which supports my argument that design decisions influence how people understand their digital footprints:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/interaction-design-brief-intro
Disclaimer: This blog post was developed with AI assistance (Perplexity) to help structuring and phrasing my reflections.
