Goal Less interactions

The act of doing something, or for that instance performing the act of doing things, has been always looked upon from the goal oriented manner.

Interaction design as a profession deals with the domain of action and the intents or goals of the same. The intent of ones action towards any interaction is generally portrayed in the goal of that activity. As interaction designers we generally follow this on our daily basis with users intent to reach a goal.

If we look more closely intent of an action need not always be towards completion of a goal using that action. At times the action has some varied intents beyond the reaching of the goal.

Curiosity can be considered as one such intent in which again the goal is to find out what the action leads to. Such a goal is of course not finite since it completely depends on the levels of curiosity itself. Also calling curiosity as an intent can also be logically incorrect considering that most of the times actions due to curiosity is a natural reaction of the body to the situations or objects that it sees. The doer of the action does not have a intention as such to do that action. The reasons of curiosity are a separate topic in itself which can be pondered upon based on the situations and contexts of the action.

Most of the times marketing and advertising people encash this attribute of human nature.

Another of such non-goal oriented actions is the intent of getting pleasure in the act of doing something itself. Although it is vividly established fact in childhood, the same is not regularly observed sanely among adults.

The act of doing something just becoz of the likeability of that action exists and is observed in regular human habits in physical world. For example the act of washing hands with a new soap itself gives pleasure or excitement to few. It may not be deep rooted pleasure. However it is also not the goal of getting clean hands that excites people. But the act of washing hands in itself makes it pleasurable.

Some of our digital acts also exist along the same lines. For example the act of unlocking and locking your new phone. Here the act of pressing certain button combination is more exciting to some then the completion of the goal of unlocking the phone.

Sometimes we call such a behavior “playing around with”, generally prohibited during childhood due the possibility of wastage of resources.What seems to be one of the reason for such an act is the design of the act in itself, which we also call interaction design. The interaction becomes pleasurable to the person who interacts and hence the act itself becomes more important then the goal of the act. Novelty of the interaction also plays an important role in it, since the same act may not be of interest with the passage of time.

The addition of such pleasures in the process of interactions of course depends on the context of it. Like you don’t want a pilot to keep playing around with the control panel just becoz he gets a kick by it. But surely an interaction for a kids shopping area could be less purposive and more pleasurable to add to the excitement of the engagement in the first place